What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like

Worth noting that shortly after publishing this article the author worked at Uber in a prominent growth role.

As if you could ever get $10 in advertising for a single person in a short amount of time. If Uber, or some other Wolf-of-Wallstreet-funded cash grabber, starts using the installs-for-cash scheme on a large scale, advertisers will no longer be willing to pay that amount of money. They won't subsidize your cab trip.

> So how would you push the prices even lower than UberPool?

By exploiting drivers harder?

But this sentence drove home the value of this article to me:

> (Special thanks to Chris Liu collaborating on these great mockups that really make the discussion in this essay pop!)

Those are not great mockups. They are Waze or Google Maps screenshots with an ad pasted onto them. If you're that addicted to hyperbole, your article should probably be taken with more than a grain of salt.

I've got my Uber "user rating" reduced more than once after asking a driver to switch their radio from adverts to a station with music. I only asked this after multiple adverts in a row but it seems drivers like their radio stations.

I rarely enter a taxi(-like) without my headphones.

Just saying, what if this was an option in Uber Pool and one of the Uber Pool riders was to be an “Ad buddy” ? The “Ad buddy” gets to ride free and other riders get a discount.

For context, “Ad Buddy” is a fictional creation introduced in Netflix Maniac series. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580146/>

Which is obvious to a lot of people except for SV "tech bros" apparently

> Free, ad-supported Uber rides are inevitable, and if Uber doesn’t do them, a different competitor – perhaps Google! – will do it.

This doesn't survive 5 min of serious analysis. Not everything that becomes cheap end up free

But hey, if they BS hard enough Sequoia might put a lot of money in them