Ask HN: Why is there no cartop advertising for personal vehicles?

4 points·wbsun··2 comments

I saw news about those cartop ad companies like Firefly, Halo by Lyft, and Uber OOH. Those are for taxi/ridesharing vehicles only. Is there any regulation/legal reason so they are not doing this for non-ridesharing vehicles? I feel the places I visit most are schools, grocery stores, shopping center/mall, outdoor parks, in which are mostly residence/personal vehicles other than taxi/ridesharing.

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Huh that’s not a bad idea. I imagine you’d face some adverse selection though since your largest userbase will be people who leave their fixer upper in the garage all year until they have time to fix it and people who drive $2,000 beater cars and could really use the extra cash. Not the ideal image for advertisers.

Also found this comment on Reddit: “Uber tracks the car top via GPS, and knows when it's turned on. There's a "Cartop display" part in account settings and it shows the number of hours online, whether the cartop is connected or disconnected, and it shows earnings for using the cartop. My earnings said $100 for Aug 3rd - Aug 10th”. So you’d have to build the hardware and infra to track usage stats rather than just mailing a sign and mounting clips to people.

I got paid to wrap my old car, so this doesn't seem too unreasonable.

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