Advertising on Pandora
The success of relevant text-only ads has been proven by Google and others. And yet, when I use Pandora (a service I love) I see nothing but giant flash ads for things I don’t care about.
The ads certainly don’t seem like they’re related to the music at all. Even in the cases where the ads have Pandora stations you can listen to, most of them are not the kind of music I like.
In spite of the fact that Pandora has all the fine-tuned settings of all my stations, and all my bookmarked songs, artists, and albums, it does not display ads that are relevant to someone with my tastes in music.
There’s a lot of room to the right of the Pandora player area to display ads. You could place a lot of text there, and provide real information that might give someone something to think about, and perhaps convince them to click on a link to learn more. It’s almost enough to put half a web page, depending on the visitor’s monitor size and resolution.
As I said, I love Pandora. They could get a lot more creative and effective with their advertising.