Satellite radio firm SiriusXM published its year-end financial results yesterday, including updated figures for its Pandora streaming subsidiary.
The latter saw its full-year advertising revenues fall 1% to $1.18bn – noting that this was “despite significant weakness in the advertising market resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic” earlier in the year. Its Q4 ad revenues were up 22% year-on-year to $425m. However, some of Pandora’s other metrics are still falling. It ended 2020 with 58.9 million monthly active users, down from 63.5 million at the end of 2019. Ad-supported listener hours fell from 13.44bn in 2019 to 12.5bn in 2020, while Pandora added 133,000 net new self-paying subscribers in 2020 to end with 6.3 million paying listeners.
“We are clearly focused on decline in listenership and we are continuing to find ways to work at that,” SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Witz told analysts in the company’s earnings call, while praising the Pandora team’s efforts on the advertising revenues front.
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