The story of Pandora has been one of fast growth in listeners and building a revenue model to capitalize on that growth.
The company blasts out 1.25 billion hours of music a month to about 200 million registered listeners, and 71 million active listeners.
It’s revenue of $427 million in fiscal 2013 nearly doubled the year before.
But the company is still working to translate success with it’s listeners into a prosperous business model.
One thought leader said, ‘Don’t trash them, learn from them.’
Five lessons media ministries can learn from Pandora
1. Publish royalty free resources. Create a model that allows your ministry to publish content that you own or have the rights to for digital distribution, or from providers that own or control a catalog of content. Pandora pays about two-thirds of its revenue to music royalties, by far its largest cost.
2. Use an existing publishing platform. Outsource high-cost technology, infrastructure, content management and player systems to third parties to lower cost of operations. Pandora burned through cash for years to develop its own product.
3. Build an internal sales infrastructure and always be looking for new potential revenue sources. Pandora’s real path to profitability is having sellers focused on its product. Recently they have been hiring top talent in local radio markets to further increase their share of the $15 billion radio ad market.
4. Develop an internship program and assign them to mentors. The idea is to let them experience the entire culture of the ministry’s digital publishing platform, from ministry, to business, to innovation. For the first time this summer, Pandora has started an internship program to help it recruit employees for sales and engineering positions.
5. Collaborate with content providers. There is a window of opportunity for Christian content creators and publishers to join together and create a platform that will ensure a healthy and vibrant future. Over 13 years ago when Pandora started, their mission was (and is) to help connect artists with their audiences and to help listeners find music that they love.
The most important thing
Like Pandora, media ministries are in a similar position when they distribute gospel content. They help creators of that content connect with their target audiences.
“The most important thing for any Christian broadcast business model is that the teaching gets before believers and seekers,” said the executive director of a large media ministry.
The opportunity for those with a stake in this challenge is to create a digital ecosystem that allows those who create the content and those who bear the expense of sharing it with others to thrive.
That’s a pretty big deal.