Pandora Users Can Now Watch Video Ads In Exchange for Skips and Playbacks (Sep 19, 2017)
Pandora has been testing a new ad model for some time and is now launching it broadly. The model offers users an opportunity to trade watching a video ad for extra skips and playbacks, both of which are normally limited under its ad-based option. That’s a familiar model from the mobile gaming market, where games often offer users additional lives or other in-game features in return for watching video ads, although anecdotal evidence from my own family suggests that those ads aren’t really being “watched” in any meaningful way – they basically insert a 30-second delay in game play during which the player does something else. Pandora says a high percentage – 42% – of its active user base has signed up for this program, which is called Video Plus, so that’s a good start, but the key metrics here aren’t the number of signups or even the number of times people agree to trade an ad view for in-app functionality, but brand recall and other more traditional ad metrics which would demonstrate that users are actually watching and taking in the content of video ads. There’s no mention of any of that in the Adweek article linked below, and whether this new model ultimately succeeds or fails will depend entirely on whether brands actually see a decent return on the investment.
via Adweek
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