Automatically Rotating Homepage Takeovers

Something going on at Pandora that I came across today really struck me. They’re automatically rotating homepage takeovers as you interact with the site. It makes sense really, it’s a radio station so you load it up, minimize the browser and forget about and the songs play on and on, and therefore there’s no point in showing ads. So when they know you’re looking at the page, on interaction, is when they start showing ads (and try and get some revenue for the amazing service they offer for free).

Just in case you are not familiar with the term ‘homepage takeover’, it’s advertising talk for when a homepage is taken over by an advertisement. I think historically it was more of a roadblock, which is when there’s an obnoxious overlay and you have to click ‘close’ to continue browsing the site, but these days it can also be when the entire page is branded (or rather co-branded) with a product. A good example is this ask.com homepage from a few weeks back that was branded with a movie which quite possibly has the longest title of all time:

So back to the Pandora website. I was initially fascinated to see this going on, that when I interacted with the site these big colorful and sometimes animated backgrounds were changing. This is something I’m used to seeing change on a page load, as I navigate from page to page, or at least refresh the page I’m on. But really what’s happening with Pandora is it’s a self contained web application, so the page itself doesn’t change but the content within tabbed navigation areas gets updated. The core of Pandora is actually a Flash app, though it’s contained within HTML, the footer is in HTML for example, and so are the ads I’m talking about here. I’m sure this is a model that will be adopted by self contained web apps that bring content to the user instead of the other way around, if it hasn’t been already.

So here’s a few examples I came across:

The Black Eyed Peas example above is probably the most visually stunning I saw.

Vitamin Water looks good.

Some Microsoft ad, not really appealing to me. This also shows an example of an inline ad badge within the playlist (Alltel).

Canon Power Shot above, it’s alright, and has an interactive movie area (which pauses the radio station). This also shows how the Alltel ad badge moves along as an item in the playlist.