What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like(andrewchen.com) |
What free, ad-supported Uber rides might look like(andrewchen.com) |
> 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.
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.
> 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
I imagine they would have the driver multitask as the presenter.
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.
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!)
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?
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?
No, it can't. This is a terrible idea. After that sentence, I continued reading for a bit, for some purely morbid type of pleasure, but eventually had to close the tab.
I need less ads in my life, not more of them.
On top of that the app showed GrabFoods ads with “food at your end location”.
And the Grab app itself is filled with ads.
It didn’t make the rides free though.
I get those in France, too, with regular Uber. They try to get me to buy something or other on Uber Eats "for when I arrive". At like 2 in the morning. And no, I don't live in NY or somewhere with restaurants open 24/7.
They also have a share (or something, not sure how this works) in a bike-sharing scheme. So, I often get notifications while in the car like "oh, you could ask your driver to stop here and get a bike for the rest of your journey". Right. If I was willing to ride a bike, I'd already be on one. If I'm in your car, it's probably because it's pouring rain, or I'm too tired / drunk.
Also I thought Uber is now getting much more expensive, not cheaper?
/s but only slightly.
I rarely enter a taxi(-like) without my headphones.
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!
For context, “Ad Buddy” is a fictional creation introduced in Netflix Maniac series. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5580146/>
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.