Screen Time: John Herrman

Nothing on Your Phone Is Safe From Ads - And few tech companies can resist also becoming media companies.

- John Herrman

LYFT, THE OTHER ride-hailing service,  announced a new feature for its app a few weeks ago: commercials. Riders would soon “see ads on their ETA screen, when they match with a driver, and during their trip,” the company said. Its “captive audience” checks their phones “nearly nine times on average” during a ride. Nine unmonetized glances: a grave error, now corrected.

Recasting the process of booking and riding in a car as an advertising opportunity wasn’t Lyft’s idea: Taxi TV beat it to the punch by at least 15 years. More recently, Uber launched its own in-app advertising feature, based on the fact that it commands “two minutes” of rider attention per ride—generating over $650 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2023 and edging the company into its first reported profit. The choice was clear to Lyft, which lost more than $100 million over that period and has never been shy about borrowing from its older competitor.

Your attention is being sold with consent you didn’t so much grant as exhaustedly relinquish.

Uber and Lyft were built to sell transportation to customers. Now, they sell advertisers access to their customers. It’s not a pivot, exactly—while Uber might not have reported a profit without its ad business, it represents a small fraction of the company’s $9.2 billion in reported revenue for the quarter—but it’s an increasingly common move across the stumbling tech industry. Remonetizing captive, paying users with ads can turn a high-revenue, low-margin business into a money-printing machine.