Ads can pay part of the fare.
The model shows the mechanism behind ad-supported rides. When a route earns ad revenue, a ride service makes more by lowering the fare on it, so more people ride and see the ads, and riders as a whole don’t come out behind. It’s the same logic as Vugo’s case for free transportation, and as sponsored rides, where a brand pays for the ride and the rider sees who paid.
Where people are going is the targeting.
The paper starts from an idea Vugo has worked on since 2015: where a rider is coming from and going to says something about them, and the ads can follow it. Vugo’s TripIntent® reads the car’s surroundings, and the destination when the driver sets one, and uses them to prioritize ads, never to filter riders out. Vugo’s own look at 30,000 rides, which the paper cites, showed how varied those destinations are.
Long rides matter most.
In the model, a sponsor is worth most on routes with lots of riders and long rides, because that is where the most people spend the most time with the screen. For a campaign, that points in-vehicle screens at the busy, longer trips: airport runs, commutes and nights out.