It ain’t 245 billion hamburgers, but Pandora’s Tim Westergren says that the ten billionth person to click the “happy thumb” on a Pandora tune has done so.
“Just over a week ago, on Sunday, April 24th at 4:46pm, ‘Ridin’ Solo’ by Jason DeRulo received Pandora’s 10 billionth thumb. 10 BILLION…wow!,” Westergren notes in his latest blog post.
Of the many milestones we’ve hit over the past 6 years, this is perhaps the one that makes us most proud. We created Pandora to bring personalization to radio, to allow each individual to determine the sound of their stations, and to make it as simple and intuitive as possible. There is no greater evidence for us of meeting that objective than the ongoing engagement you have all shown in your use of the thumbs.
In celebration, I just logged into Pandora and got Samuel Barber’s beautiful First Symphony, which I immediately thumbed up myself.
Pandora plans to go public, as everybody knows. According to its S-1 Form, it had 80 million registered users as of January 2011. The company estimates that it adds a new registered user every second (on average).
Plus, Pandora has cornered around half of all Internet radio listening among the top 20 online stations and networks in the United States, according to one survey. “Since we launched the Pandora service in 2005, our listeners have created over 1.4 billion stations,” the document adds.
That’s a lot of stations and a lot of people. “We will continue to work every day to get better, as this task has no end,” Westergren’s post concludes. “And that’s what makes this so much fun.”
