When people think of Pandora, they of course think of music. The company is hoping, however, that they can take their massive music loving audience, and get them to view video ads as well. With nearly 80 million active monthly listeners, this has the potential to be a large new source of inventory for video ads as well, which is becoming more and more important as the traditional sites like YouTube, Facebook, and others getting saturated with these ads.
Pandora made the announcement that all of their advertisers will be able to create and incorporate video ads into their campaigns. The new product, being called Video Plus ads, are already being used by some of the bigger advertisers, including T-Mobile.
The ad program is quite attractive to brands because they only have to pay when a user watches a 15-second video. Users are encouraged to watch the video by being offered some type of perk on the platform, such as the ability to skip additional songs or options to replay songs they like.
In testing, Pandora found that those who were most likely to watch the videos were in the very attractive 18-34 year old demographic, which may make this system even more popular.
On top of that, Pandora has released their second-quarter 2017 report, which showed that they finished their deal to sell Ticketfly for $200 million, and brought in a $480 million strategic investment from Sirius XM Holdings.
Pandora said that they will be using the funds for, “targeted investments and capitalize on opportunities to build on its position in the streaming audio business.”
The CFO, Naveen Chaopra, commented saying, “We have taken a number of steps to hone the company’s strategy and position Pandora to continue to build audience and extend monetization through a combination of advertising and subscription revenue streams.”
