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With driverless electric vehicles, an ad model can economically work. You get in the car and there's a screen with ads and if you pay extra, you get the premium
by dumbfoundded 8y ago
With driverless electric vehicles, an ad model can economically work. You get in the car and there's a screen with ads and if you pay extra, you get the premium features like no ads and music control.
The only hard part is bootstrapping the capital to get network effects (you want enough cars so that users don't have to wait a long time). Google should have enough money.
- tehlike 8y agoAd would be a smaller part. If google can charge, it will prefer to charge. Then google has video ecosystem that is yt. And a bunch of new services that will proloferate because of the platform.
- ForrestN 8y agoFor their sake, I hope Google are wise enough not to hasten the coming backlash to advertising with such an aggressively annoying disposition toward their customers.
- jedberg 8y agoI'm pretty sure Google's thought process is more along the lines of, "If you aren't driving you have more time to use the Internet, which means more time to look at our ads all across the Internet". That's why they launched Google Fiber. They charged basically cost for it, in the hopes that it's customers would use more internet. I suspect it will be the same here -- charging actual cost (maybe including some free wifi?) in the hopes that you spend more time on the Internet.
- gretch 8y agoThis theory doesn't make sense because whether there is a human driving an Uber or a machine driving a waymo taxi, the person in the backseat has the same amount of internet time. The situation is categorically different than the fiber situation because fiber was about being vertically integrated. Theoretically a middle man (ISPs) can gang up on google and cut google out. It wasn't just about getting 'more time'.
- elliekelly 8y agoThe vast majority of cars on the road have only one passenger - the driver.
- alexis_fr 8y agoAd-featured taxis experience is quite common in Thailand or Vietnam: You pay to get to some hotel, and they drive you to ...another hotel and make you visit it, until you pay a second time to get to the right hotel without detour. Sounds very Google-like, now that I think about it. Can’t wait.
- dumbfoundded 8y agoI think you're ignoring how revolutionary free transportation would be. Even it was annoying, you'd change so much and if you didn't like it, you could pay money to have no ads or a car to yourself.
- rifung 8y agoI would be very surprised if they decide to monetize this with ads. My impression is that the executives very much want to diversify income streams. You can see this with Cloud, GSuite, Chrome OS, hardware, etc. It doesn't make sense (to me) to want to throw even more eggs into the same basket. I work for Google but opinions are my own.
- asah 8y agoGoogle's advertiser-side ad network/tools/analytics is lightyears ahead, and I'll bet they can capture more $ from video ads in-car than actual ride $. Of course, why not do both? :-) (ex-googler)
- why_only_15 8y agoI find it hard to really believe that could be true. At least on YouTube, even with video ads CPM is ~$10, where as CPM for a taxi service is more like $10,000. It doesn't seem like it could be a particularly important amount of money to them.
- dumbfoundded 8y agoMaybe surveys or something more interactive would work. On Facebook, you can pay $10 for someone filling out a survey.
- dumbfoundded 8y agoI think it would be genius. Imagine if you could get absolutely free transportation anywhere. Uber/Lyft is great but prohibitively expensive for a lot of people.