Sensor Tower states that Pandora grossed $80 millions during the Quarter and passed Netflix as the number One app by revenue in the U.S., while Pandora’s own financial report shows revenues of $378.6 Million.
Either way, those numbers pushed Pandora ahead of Netflix of its top ranking for the first time in several quarters in the U.S. While Netflix maintained its position as the Number One app globally, excluding games, in Q3.
Pandora has now become the #1 top grossing non-gaming app in Q3 2017.
A report from Sensor Tower states that the music streaming platform grossed $80 million in this quarter alone; nearly a 150% increase from last year’s Q3 of $35 million. Sensor Tower limited its findings to in-app purchases leaving questions for how adequate the company is performing overall. Pandora released their own financial report for Q3 2017 claiming that the total revenue was actually $378.6 million. Their paid service, Pandora Premium, surpassed the 1 million subscriber mark in October placing the company ahead of its competitors such as Spotify and Apple Music and headed of Netflix.
This is a big turnaround from just last quarter of this year when, Tim Westergren, stepped down and resigned as the company’s CEO. Around this time, Pandora received a $480 million cash infusion from Sirius XM to “refocus and reinforce” the company’s direction. Prior to this, Pandora’s own Ticketfly was acquired by Eventbrite for $200 million in hopes of streamlining the user experience. Still, these accomplishments didn’t outweigh Pandora’s troubling licensing costs or put into perspective how they should expand their markets outside of the U.S. The company’s current CEO, Roger Lynch expressed his gratitude and dedication for Pandora’s upward growth.
Lynch discussed these financial results yesterday over a conference call saying, “After just a short time here at Pandora, it’s clear to me we have a tremendous opportunity to meet the full spectrum of our listeners’ and advertisers’ needs. We have significant scale, distribution, and products that deliver a superior listening experience. We will leverage these strengths to become a more integral part of our listeners’ lives and reinforce our position as the definitive source for audio advertising.”
Advertising revenue and other metrics.
Pandora raked in over $275 million in advertising revenue indicating a 1% year-over-year improvement. Advertising revenue growth incorporates an increase in the average price per ad, offset by a decrease in the number of ads sold.
Other interesting business metrics to look at are listening hours and active listeners. With its decision to leave Australia and New Zealand, Pandora listening hours went slightly down from e 5.15 billion for the third quarter of 2017, compared to 5.40 billion while active listeners were 73.7 million at the end of the third quarter of 2017, a million drop since leaving those markets.
Shortly after releasing their Q3 performance reports, Pandora’s earnings per share went down 6 cents. This may seem bad but was actually better than predictions from financial analysts projecting an 8 cents decrease.
Pandora has a huge opportunity to become the leader of audio streaming applications. With much of Q3’s numbers leaning in their favor, let’s hope that Lynch has what it takes to keep this track record on the up and up.
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