alt Hacker NewsSo many times on this website, people say, "I will pay for the service to get rid of advertising." You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper. It is naive to think any company isn't finding ways to monetize your behavior, whether you're paying them or not.
Replies
I paid quite a fee to have crave streaming service in canada. It's pretty premium with HBO and that. Yet, all the star trek shows are now behind ads.. several minutes for a 20 minute episode of lower decks. Things are getting out of hand.
I think when you give money for a service it's a reasonable expectation that the company you're giving the money to will respect your privacy, if only because selling your data is not a great outlook and could jeopardize the main revenue stream. I'm guess I'm proven wrong
If you arent paying, you are the product.
And if you are paying… you’re still the product as well.
In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials. That didn't last long...
People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.
"You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper" - you can't just say things. You could very well be right but you need to actually look at their margin profile over time to know if this is true.
To give an industry that's a counterexample to the "they add ads and don't make things cheaper", look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
The key concept is that maximising the monetisation of each user is the ultimate goal. Once that is understood, Uber's behaviour makes sense as a subgoal of that bigger goal
Uber ride app has ads in it now on top of data collection, service fees, etc, uber eats also sells sponsored placement, and then the fees and prices now... like what the actual fuck is this? https://s.h4x.club/9Zun85Lj - these people have lost their minds, y'all really gonna drive the business down to 10 loyal customers who you milk to hell and high water? Weird strategy.
Which is why I don't pay to remove ads on YouTube, nor I give Amazon the pleasure to see more from my money than what I need to pay for prime deliveries.
The prevailing implementation of capitalism compels all companies to continue developing revenue streams to increase their overall “worth.”
Any company that has unique or rare data is compelled to do things with it. Those that don’t either can’t figure out how or explicitly reject the reward function of contemporary capitalism. We should really expect those deviations to be the exception.
Yup. The most surprising thing about this announcement is that they haven't been doing it, already...
Okay.
They’re going to sell to marketers for ads I don’t watch?
We have to be real, there's no way anyone is currently paying the real cost of having McDonalds delivered right now...
Delivery in particular remains underpriced at even the high prices we see. The way the platforms are set up, you're basically paying to chauffeur a single order straight to your house, on-demand. Mobile tech and "own car" efficiencies don't begin to cover those costs. The problem was that this is the kind of service that they had to offer in order to supersede existing delivery.
In an ideal world, you'd instead have drivers assigned to either particular neighborhoods or particular restaurants, allowing for order-stacking and predictable routes. Bonus for set-time daily deliveries (get your order in before 6 or have to wait until 9). Bigger bonus for set neighborhood drop-off points (like those consolidated mailboxes, but warming compartments). Anything more bespoke would cost extra.
Unfortunately, the balance of inefficient operations, decreasing competition, and "line go up" is that prices have to increase.
[flagged]
When people say they are going to pay for an ad free product they very often underestimate how much the service would cost them. This is often a price higher than what they would be willing to pay.
If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising, you are exactly the market segment advertisers want to reach. They will always be willing to pay to outbid that segment’s own desire to not see ads.