Yep. People are paying for the privilege of segmenting themselves into the high disposable income categories of the market. They're paying to do the corporation's market segmentation for them.

Added to that: it's in the middleman's interest to blur this distinction. You can sell a lot more "may or may not be rich enough to buy your product" adverts than you can "definitely rich enough" adverts. Even if the rate per advert is slightly lower, it probably makes the middleman (Uber in this case) more money. (And the rate per advert probably won't be a lot lower because companies have fixed advertising budgets.)

So now, to justify removing someone from your pool of advertisees, they don't just need to pay what could be made by advertising to them; they need to pay for what could be made to advertise to them and (unwittingly) several poorer people.

So it’s not

“If you don’t pay for a product, you are the product”

It’s

“If you don’t pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you’d pay for the product”

I don't know about "always", but the general correlation of interest in "paying to not have ads" and interest of advertising dollars in "paying to get to you" rings true and is often overlooked.

This is very insightful

> If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising

So a fancy way to say that if you have 10 dollars?

I started to rebut this with the expected value of the bid... but if you're advertising a sports car, it's worth paying $100/impression even if your conversion rate is 1%.