That's assuming the only reason they paid that much of those trips was because of price. That's not true of how Uber operates. They do a lot of things like dr

That's assuming the only reason they paid that much of those trips was because of price. That's not true of how Uber operates. They do a lot of things like driver incentives (for being logged on a certain amount of time etc, or for signing up in the first place - a lot of this is during market setup for a given city), complete discounted rides based on new signups for riders, etc. You can assume as their penetration into the market saturates for both drivers and riders that both of these costs will diminish. A lot of people on Hacker News being US based also ignore the fact that Uber is highly international. I use it almost everywhere I travel for work, I think Malta was one of the few places they weren't. Lyft and similar competitors are mostly either US-specific or even city-specific. There is a lot of different economies in other regions to look at.