Waze officially launches its ad program for small businesses | Hacker News Reader

Waze officially launches its ad program for small businesses

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36 pointsartsandsci43 comments

I'd prefer if drivers watched the road and not pop up ads on Waze.

The ads only show up when the car isn't moving, such as when it's stopped at an intersection.

I hate this. Focusing on the road, even when at an intersection is still the duty of the driver. You have to be active and engaged the entire time you are behind the wheel, not use red lights as an excuse to type out a quick text. I can't tell you how many times I had to honk the horn because a damned distracted driver had their heads down at a green light. This is unsafe as well. Additionally, what if a drunk driver plows through the intersection and comes at you head on? Instead of any chance of reacting + surviving, you are dead. What if an ambulance comes, and you are blocking the left turn lane and you didn't notice because you were too busy looking at a phone or app?

As an aside -- we have 100% proven we simply cannot be trusted with smartphones or electronics behind the wheel. I know most will think this is too extreme but I am all for outright banning them from being in the hands of a driver at. all.

I'd prefer if drivers watched the road and not pop up ads on Waze.

Now Waze has an incentive to choose the route with the most red lights. The driving version of the "slideshow" listicle.

'You can skip this intersection in 15, 14, 13...'

A drive would still be distracted while stopped at an intersection.

My wife refuses to use Waze due to the ads. I prefer Waze b/c I'm in motion almost my entire commute (95% freeway).

How long until Waze collaborates with Waymo (Wazemo?) and the ads are just for the captive passengers, not the driver?

Portable VR headsets are going to have a killer app. Not having to pay attention to self-driving car ads.

I'm imagining Google releasing an AR app that perfectly represents the reality around you, except stripped of all ads.

(Except the subtle consumer friendly ones that they put in, of course.)

I thought the ads only pop up when the car is stopped?

Drivers should be paying attention to their immediate surroundings while stopped. Especially because the signals may change, or they may need to move for emergencies services or to evade a careening car heading their way.

And also to not incite road rage from their fellow drivers because they are sitting stopped at a green light. You could also cause a fender bender because other drivers, who also may be distracted slightly, are expecting the cars to move and then are startled when they look away for a brief second because the car in front of them had to brake for the car stopped at a green light. Some states hand out tickets for being braked at a green light.

and the one time I feel comfortable looking at Waze to scan the route ahead is when I'm stopped, and an annoying ad is in the way. It's utterly obnoxious and given Google's warchest is unnecessary.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume that other Google properties will perpetually subsidize groups like Waze.

Waze ads are an area where I feel an audio ad would be a better approach.

I think if Waze did audio, they'd cause more accidents - usually I have Audible or Music running at the same time if I'm using Waze.

Perhaps that's why they're partnering with Spotify (well other than you can't run Waze on Carplay)?

I may be dating myself, but why would a waze audio ad cause accidents more than a radio ad? There might be logic to make sure the ad doesn't overlap audio navigation guidance, but that seems like a feasible constraint.

But who is preventing them from watching the road? If a driver is so confused by notifications or popups on a tiny screen occupying probably < 5% of their field of view, I think they should put the phone upside down and rely on audio.

I hope that they are targeted a bit more locally than they are at the moment - yesterday I had one pop up when I stopped at some traffic lights 20 minutes from home (having been driving for an hour and a half) that suggested I take a 55 minute detour to go to a KFC!

I wonder what the conversion rate is for a 30+ minute detour for some hot wings would be. ;)

Does anyone else open Waze only momentarily to make sure their primary route does not have significant traffic? I don't need it to direct me the entire drive, so I just quickly check to make sure there isn't some catastrophic accident that will block my path. After that I shut it down, put on a podcast, and go on my merry way.

The optimal route will often change during my commute. Your commute may be significantly shorter than mine.

I did do that for sometime but I found that my commute has gotten worse with more accidents and constructions so I'm finding that almost 40% of the time my commute changes with Waze with new routes saving me tons of time in traffic. Plus it allows me to explore the country side more as a side-effect.

Yeah, I tend to do this, but rarely (about once in a couple of months) traffic gets so bad on a specific part of my commute (where I literally have no viable alternative routes) that I'd wished I'd kept it on so I could turn around and just WFH.

Waze has saved me a couple of times where I find that out 5-10m through the drive and just turn around so I don't sit through important meeting in the car.

Google/Apple maps just don't update fast enough as they're not crowdsourced.

I wonder how many people remember it is acquired by Google?

It would be nice if Waze launched an ad-free program for its users. What would they have to price an ad-free program at?

It would need to be a subscription service - unlike a game or a disk partitioning tool, they can't support it for four years, then stop supporting it after without taking negative PR.

Realistically, an ad-free program subscription would usually be marked up from what they can make per-user per-month off of ad revenue - so maybe take ad revenue, add $5 and round to the nearest ten?

I really doubt their yearly revenue for user with ads would be more than 5 dollars a year. So, 10 dollars a year. Add some nice corner-case features, maybe some gamefication bonus, and it could work.

As a sidenote, "add $5 and round to the nearest ten" is equivalent to "round to the next ten" everytime.

Just to nitpick, if they earn $6, you add $5 then it'll be $11, rouding to next ten will make it $20, not $10...

He's saying that adding $5 and rounding to the nearest ten is same as rounding to the next ten. So 6+5 = 11 rounds to 10. 6 rounded up to the net is 10.

I would pay a reasonable fee to not have ads on Waze.

Use an ad blocker and they will rarely show up. When I stop, Waze shows me what people reported on the road ahead. "Car stopped in 3 miles."

Ad blocker on a mobile device?

I use AdAway - https://f-droid.org/packages/org.adaway/ on my Android phone. Downloads lists of advertising hostnames and blocks them via /etc/hosts. It's licensed under GPL-3.0. Requires you to have rooted your phone.

Another option for Android users (that doesn't require root) is Blokada -https://f-droid.org/packages/org.blokada.alarm/

Just looked into how it works without root access. It apparently creates a local VPN interface and routes traffic through it. Which is a fine way of doing it, except it prevents you from using other VPNs on the same device at the same time - https://blokada.org/api/v3/content/en/help.html#howitworks - FWIW, this is also how Tor on Android (using Orbot) works for non-rooted devices (if you want to routes apps that don't have socks proxy support).

Just to clarify re "VPN", it's not actually a VPN to any third party service, it's just a local "fake" VPN interface to intercept traffic.

Hosts list. Doesn't work as well on mobile. Unsure how Waze does their ads, but on mobile you get a white box with "Couldn't load!" or something of that sort instead of no ad at all.

This actually seems like a good idea if it just shows up when in your map view rather than pulling your view to the pin. It would be well targeted adds without requiring you to collect data about the user. If its visible it's because you're close.

You better believe they're going to collect that user data though.

For one, Waze's whole raison d'etre is to collect data from drivers.

And then yeah, for advertisers, advertisers want to know how many people of what demographics see their ads and the like.

Hopefully they're better than Google Maps at showing ads for things that are actually open.

I'm surprised more apps with maps don't do this, like Uber.

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