April 20, 2024

Pandora Gains on Subscriptions and Mobile Ads

In its first quarterly earnings since going public, Pandora Media, the company behind the Internet radio service, reported increased revenue on Thursday, as well as growth in subscriptions and mobile advertising.

For the three months that ended July 31, its fiscal second quarter, Pandora reported $67 million in revenue, up 117 percent from the same period a year ago. That beat the expectations of most analysts, who had predicted $60 million to $61 million. It was the company’s sixth consecutive quarter of triple-digit growth in revenue, measured year-over-year.

Pandora posted a net loss of $1.8 million, or 4 cents a share.

Advertising was $58.3 million of Pandora’s revenue for the quarter. Ads for mobile devices, where the majority of the service’s listening takes place, represented about half that amount. It was the first time mobile ad revenue had reached that level, the company said, although it has not disclosed the ratio in the past.

Last month, Pandora said that more than 100 million users had signed up for the service, and in a conference call with analysts on Thursday, Steven M. Cakebread, the chief financial officer, said that 37 million users tuned in at least once a month. For the quarter, Pandora users listened to a total of 1.8 billion hours of music, up 125 percent over the same period last year.

The company’s greatest expense is “content acquisition,” or royalties paid to music companies, and for the quarter Pandora paid $33.7 million for content, about half of its revenue.

Pandora raised $235 million in its stock offering on June 15, with shares initially priced at $16. On Thursday, the stock closed at $12.47, up 40 cents, or 3.31 percent, for the day.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=699571e7d9bb4ad81944843465d5f74c

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