Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like

andrewchen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like

#41

Post by quickthrower2 »

The starbucks idea is most on the money and I can see free rides could be subsidised by destinations.

A bit like some casinos will pay for your cab to get there I am sure a shopping centre could pay $10 for an uber contingent on spending say $500 in stores and this reduces their parking demand too.

Restaurants and bars would consider it surely. Each beer is $1 off your ride home. Might discourage drink driving!

Eventually, like a Bangkok Tuktuk you will be taken to a shop for an hour to buy some emeralds and shit on the way to your actual destination!

Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like

#42

Post by pooper »

imgabe wrote: post #38

Never 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 w…

I think we need something like Uber pool but run as subsidized city infrastructure. Like a fleet of small bus or maybe even a full size bus without a fixed route, picking up and dropping passengers throughout the city.

I feel like there's valuable information that could help planners plan bus routes and potentially local transit train tracks but why would someone like Uber ever voluntarily share this data with planning authority?

Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like

#44

Post by dspillett »

dareobasanjo wrote: post #35

Benedict 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 i…

> There is no ad model where you can justify paying that sort of money for random people at scale.

The ad industry wouldn't be interested in this for random impressions, but I'd be interested¹ to see how much different it would make for the average person² with full stalky personal history based ad matching enabled. They know who you are from your app profile and for the free rides the app could demand access to contacts/messages/other³.

Of course this would have great potential to cause embarrassment for some people in a taxi-sharing situation. I can see the reddit-thread-copied-by-buzzfeed-copied-by-everyone-else listicles of stories now, you'll not believe number 12!

--

[1] and not at all surprised to find someone has worked it out in detail and submitted a business plan if the numbers don't look atrocious

[2] the tech-savvy might be able to block the stalkiness, but the average person either can't or doesn't want to make the effort

[3] if not for regular rides, I can see a service offering one free ride in exchange for this access – Amazon offered me a £5 voucher in exchange for just the date of birth of my non-existent baby a while back (I'd been looking for something for a friend who is far less anti-child than I!)

Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like

#45

Post by dspillett »

cube00 wrote: post #30
tgv wrote: post #14

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 sen…

I could see hospitals paying $10 to lure a potential patient in.

Ah, the black-mirror-esk horror that is the American medical system, which we'll be moving to once our government finally kills what is left of the NHS…

Though more generally I think the only other industry that would pay enough to make the ads worthwhile if not very targetted at the individual passenger, is the industry that the cabs wouldn't want to that visibly be associated with if trying to maintain a wholesome company image.

Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like

#46

Post by salgernon »

raverbashing wrote: post #20
shaoonb wrote: post #6

Public transport is covered in ads, has a much higher ridership than rideshares (i.e. has many more eyeballs to sell, and much lower per-user costs) and isn't even close to being profitable from ad revenue.

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

It’s Uber for timeshare pitches. You get a ride to the airport instead of a fruit basket for sitting through the pitch.

I imagine they would have the driver multitask as the presenter.

Re: What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like

#47

Post by Mikho »

Interestingly, in some mock ups the ad completely covers the map—the main reason why a user would look at the screen at all whily waiting for Uber. This extremely degrades experience of using the service. This idea is the same way "creative" as to say that an ad that covers the front window of a car in full for a driver not to see the road would help driver make more money while he drives.
Post reply on HN