Is this a joke?
What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
31–40 of 48 posts
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#32Worth noting that shortly after publishing this article the author worked at Uber in a prominent growth role.
Ah, that makes sense. The article makes much more sense as a hustle exercise than an actual business idea
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#33As if you could ever get $10 in advertising for a single person in a short amount of time. If Uber, or some other Wolf-of-Wallstreet-funded cash grabber, starts using the installs-for-cash scheme on a large scale, advertisers will no longer be willing to pay that amount of money. They won't subsidize your cab trip. > So how would you push the prices even lower than UberPool? By exploiting drivers harder? But this sen…
YT now shows 6 ads, for 10 minutes video, they share 50:50 with creator, who gets about 10$(+/-100% depending on viewers demographic) for 1000 views - it is nowhere close to cover the cost of Uber drive.
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
The blog author is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
...cool? does that position come with the ability to defy gravity or math?
No, but it does mean that someone (e.g. the authors company) might just put money into the idea.
They don’t even need to BS very hard if they are a partner in the firm, and sponsor a “vetted” team that they think can pivot from something stupid to something profitable.
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#35Benedict Evans is fond of saying that ads is one of the biggest revenue makers for tech but is completely misunderstood by anyone who doesn’t work on it.
An Uber ride typically costs tens of dollars. There is no ad model where you can justify paying that sort of money for random people at scale. All of the examples in the article are forms of specific niches with high ROI (e.g. targeting a user known to buy IAPs to install Candy Crush, email addresses of corporate employees to sell them expensive SaaS products, etc). These are all outliers.
The average Uber ride is about $25 according to https://finance.yahoo.com/news/average-uber-lyft-prices-then...
Facebook’s ARPU in Q3 of 2022 was $50 according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
So it takes a Facebook user 6 weeks of viewing ads to generate the sad revenue equivalent to one Uber ride. Cool mock ups but this is an idea that makes less business sense than having SBF run a crypto exchange with no oversight.
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#36As 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 sen…
Andrew Chen / A16z team / Crypto - All hyperbole. Take with pinch of salt.
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The blog author is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
All the more reason to be skeptical. These VC/Crypto boys live in a bubble. https://a16z.com is hard crypto!
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#38Never in my life have I been in a situation where there wasn’t an ad and thought “Gee I wish someone would show me an ad right now”
Uber doesn’t need to be dirt cheap, it just needs to be cheaper than taxis and/or a better experience. That’s what drew people to it in the first place, taxis sucked.
> Instead, my proposal would be to put the ad units on your smartphone, in the dead time while waiting for your car and when you’re on your ride.
This is even dumber than I thought. Why am I going to look at an ad on my phone? Why am I not going to close the app and look at something else?
How could it possibly be worth anything to show an ad to somebody who is so broke they will watch ads instead of paying $10 for an Uber ride?
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#39This is terrible. It lacks any sort of understanding of both business and user. It also lacks imagination. In China, there's a screen on the back to the seats showing ads to passengers when they enter. I'm sure it doesn't bring in huge amounts of revenue but at least it gets more user attention, which is what ads are supposed to capture.
Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like
#40That sounds like a wildly unprofitable concept at first, but I could envision a sort of torture chamber, where you get to stop the torture by actually paying for the service. All other things being equal, the torture may as well come in the form of ads.