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Uber Lays Off 400

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#161

Post by UberIsAnnoying »

I hope it included the people responsible for sending me the most abusive SPAM campaigns I have had in years.

1) I never subscribed to these e-mails

2) The e-mails contain a link to unsubscribe in this format: click.uber.com/f/a/

3) You get redirected to uber.com/unsubscribe

4) They make you manually fill your e-mail

5) When you press unsubscribe:

- It makes a request to uber.com/api/unsubscribe?email=&et_job_id=&et_list_id=&et_batch_id=&message_uuid=&content_identifier=

- Response is always 404 Not Found (Tested on Firefox, Chrome, IE, Edge)

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#162

Post by ghaff »

zemotion wrote: post #160
quickthrower2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. There is a big billboard ad here in Sydney, which seems to be coordinated with a radio and online marketing campaign, around saying how 'safe' Uber is. Could campaigns like this all around the world be centralized into a smaller team?

It's not quite that simple. The needs and responses of a local market can be completely different from one to the next. Because of differing cultures, we respond very differently to color palettes, design aesthetics, safety concerns, cool factors, etc. And since the entire point of marketing is to sell, then the the brand's visuals, branding strategy, responses to concerns, etc, all have to be completely customized f…

I'm in Japan at the moment and I was talking to someone the other day about design. There's a contrast that always strikes me. On the one hand there's this very restrained aesthetic in so much of traditional Japanese art and culture. On the other hand, most display advertising and a lot of signage in general looks like something knocked out by a random intern with no design experience at all turned loose on a desktop publishing program and told to go wild.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#163

Post by spectramax »

UberIsAnnoying wrote: post #161

I hope it included the people responsible for sending me the most abusive SPAM campaigns I have had in years. 1) I never subscribed to these e-mails 2) The e-mails contain a link to unsubscribe in this format: click.uber.com/f/a/ 3) You get redirected to uber.com/unsubscribe 4) They make you manually fill your e-mail 5) When you press unsubscribe: - It makes a request to uber.com/api/unsubscribe?email= &et_job_id=&et…

I am no lawyer but pretty sure this violates:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#164

Post by resters »

aresant wrote: post #79
nemothekid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think driver incentives falls under marketing spend at Uber. Driver Incentives are they will pay driver $X to make $Y trips. Essentially riders are paying $5 and drivers are making $6. I believe this is where most of the money is burned at Lyft as well.

UBER masks this real number across many of their general line items. EG they put ~$300,000,000 of the "Driver Incentive" cost into "Cost of Revenue" line item that represents: - "Any amount paid to a driver that exceeds the revenue earned by that driver (for instance, if a driver’s earnings from a trip exceed the fare for that trip). Excess driver incentives jumped by about $300 million in 2018 from the previous year…

I am not a shareholder, but I think market share is the short term goal. The incentives can be phased out as prices increase a bit after competition cools off.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#165

Post by komali2 »

cosmodisk wrote: post #123
bduerst wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though? Most pizza delivery is an ancillary service to the restaurant itself. Are there very many profitable pizza-delivery only businesses? Also you could argue that for the genre of restaurants where delivery is profitable as an ancillary service (pizza, chinese, etc.), they already offer delivery and there isn't any profitable market for the restaurants where they didn't have it before.

It's not profitable because every single restaurant does it for itself only.A post office service would never make a dime if it was only covering a small town.Scale it up to the entire city and it becomes very interesting

Back in frontier west, outside US territory (and therefore not served by the Post Office Department or the Pony Express), people would set up highly profitable transportation companies. These companies would make deliveries for local shops but also carry mail, bringing stuff to somewhere served by the Post Office Department or the Pony Express or the Wells Fargo freight routes.

I read all this in a book ages ago but I was skimming through some wikipedia articles that mention some of what I'm talking about if you're interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_Express#Stations

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#166

Post by Scoundreller »

aianus wrote: post #125
jcims wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do that many people share rides with strangers in Uber? I never have.

I can tell you that as a driver, about ~25% of my ride requests in Toronto are Pool requests. We also have Express Pool where you get picked up / dropped off at some walkable distance from your actual origin/destination to make it even cheaper for the consumer and more efficient for drivers. At one point Uber was even competing with the bus / streetcar with a special ride type where you would have to be picked up or…

I thought that promo was only during a weekend subway shutdown.

Just looked at an Uber trip in Toronto, and the breakdown is:

Express Pool: $8.44

Pool: $11.25

UberX: $17.38

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#167

Post by Angostura »

Twirrim wrote: post #96
_bxg1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see there being localization challenges, especially when you start talking about multiple countries. Not just languages; cultural nuance, idioms, and political awareness all matter.

Does that particular aspect require full time staff in-situ, though?

Just the legal aspects of regulation would. See Uber's struggles in London.

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#168

Post by projektfu »

rsp1984 wrote: post #110

Can someone with insight into the matter explain, from a high level, what the big concerns are over Ubers ability to run profitably? In my naive view they are "just running an app" / acting as a mobility marketplace and they make money on each transaction. Given the traction and market dominance they have this sounds like a really attractive business. So how do they manage to run such big losses every year and which…

The big concerns are whether drivers will continue to accept the pay they are offered. In 2018 they spent $837 million on excess pay to get drivers to accept certain trips. Insurance costs are also high, a large portion of their revenue.

Assuming their chart is representative of an average booking, $1 in excess incentives corresponds to a $10 booking. If so, 15-20% of their bookings appear to produce no revenue and cost money through excess incentives. They must be doing this to stay ahead of their competitors and/or encourage people to use the app.

Once the gross revenue picture is done, you have the relatively fixed operating costs. They are spending a fortune on marketing and consumer incentives, as are their competitors.

Overall they lost a bunch of money but made up for it through selling off the Russia/SEA businesses for a few billion. They also marked up their investment in Didi (which I believe they spun off before). But that's a paper increase.

So, they could become leaner. They also may continue to grow their way out of the hole. They do make money on most transactions. But becoming operating-profitable is a matter of putting competitors out of business and increasing demand for rideshare generally. They also need to get people to pay for the currently unprofitable trips. (Personally, I wonder how often they are leaving revenue on the table with their incentives.)

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#169

Post by golergka »

fluxic wrote: post #39

Love to revisit this piece every few years. Why food delivery will never be profitable: "The Food Delivery Death Star" https://medium.com/@review/the-food-delivery-death-star-85f9...

Great article, thanks for the link.

But I can't help but notice that these numbers are all for US, and US is a very prosperous country with low income inequality and high-paid workers. In other countries, where labor of low-level workers costs less (compared to the purchasing power of those who order delivery) it could be a completely different picture. Here, I earn a salary which would be around middle-class in US, and yet, my Uber ride usually costs around $3-4 (as opposed to $30 in the article).

Re: Uber Lays Off 400

#170

Post by projektfu »

CydeWeys wrote: post #137
SilasX wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You literally cannot profitably transport people at the prices they're offering That's not my understanding of the figures, which say that they're charging plenty enough to cover the costs associated with the ride, but are blowing lots of money on aggressive marketing. The transportation costs (i.e. driver pay and customer service) are not what's killing them.

A lot of these "marketing" costs are clever ways of hiding costs of providing rides as separate line items.

Yes, but if they were all driver incentives, there would be no revenue according to the model they're using. Customer incentives, on the other hand, are hidden in operating costs and not placed in the cost of revenue where they probably should be.
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