So, recently I have been on this Pandora kick. As an internet advertising guy, I find myself always looking at how display ads are shown on pages and wondering their effect.

Here is two screenshots I took of Pandora’s single ad placement on their player.

Some observations:
1) It seems they use the one placement for all their ad sizes, a 300×250, 160×600 and a background. Depending on the refresh, you will only see one ad, the size and type varying.

2) In the cases of the normal display ads, they are completely out of place versus the layout of the page.

3) Despite being completely out of place, with my computer screen size, and firefox at full screen, the ads are smack dab in the middle of the my computer screen.

This leads to some interesting questions,

1) Was this purposely planned? It makes the ads a bit more jarring, but not overly so. This should bring the ads to attention for the user, but not be overly annoying (think the flashing ads you may have seen).

2) What is the performance of these ads? What is the CPM pandora can sell at? On the one hand, these are pretty well placed ads. On the other, we are talking about a music player, which essentially means people are not looking at it all the time. In fact, there are probably epople who leave it ona nd walk away from the desk. There is no requirement for interaction to use which should mean lower performance, possibly even worse than social networks where users are at least interacting with the current page.

Of course, in the end, I may have completely overestimated the thought processes involved in creating these, but whether intentional or not, I would love to know the metrics on an ad unit on Pandora.