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Comment by nojvek | Hacker News Reader

I always think about the time when Facebook and Google were bleeding money. They were thought of as terrible businesses.

When you have a shit ton of eye balls, you have a money printing machine: "Ads". Just plaster them in the face of users. Now with machine learning and average user expecting little privacy, you can really target the ads and customize it per person.

It's amazing Wikipedia hasn't gone in the path of ads. I'm grateful for that.

If uber's self driving car gizmo works out, which there is a good chance. They can make zero profit on rides and make them $1/10 mile trip. Make the cream off in car entertainment and services.

They can have average person buy the car and rent it out to Uber network. Airbnb already loans money to home owners to renovate their houses.

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If a large user base were the only metric, then shouldn't Twitter have more robust revenue numbers? (Though I think I can see a world where Uber has more relevant tracking data than Twitter)

Also, I hate flying airlines where they'll keto allowing you ads on their in flight screen (I think I had one flight where there was no entertainment and just ads). I'd happily rider on a competitor with higher prices that didn't thrust a bright ad laden display on me during the trip.

Twitter also has what somewhat ridiculous costs

Totally. I hate Vegas taxis for showing ads.

> When you have a shit ton of eye balls, you have a money printing machine:

> They can make zero profit on rides and make them $1/10 mile trip

This only works when your incremental costs are next to nothing. The IRS lets you deduct about 40 cents a mile for business expenses when you drive for your job.

That's the baseline for incremental costs for servicing passengers. Do you think you can sell 4 dollars worth of ads during a 10 mile trip, no matter how much data you have on the consumer? Plus the database on customer demographics and buying preferences is very jealously guarded by both FB and Google.

Not to mention the huge amounts of capital tied up in cars, self-driving equipment, and a group of techs that are maintaining and repairing all these cars. That adds even more incremental costs, servicing all the capital.

We're talking about having ads that are a couple of orders of magnitude more profitable than Google and Facebook ads are right now.

Biggest driving cost for driving is humans. Once you have self driving cars, a $50k electric car with 20 year span and a million mile life costs about 5c a mile. Even with servicing and maintenance costs, you still make quite a bit of money on $1/mile.

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