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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.

This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.

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That's around 44.64 (0.18831) per month, no wonder ads are preferrable to companies over subscriptions! That's actually a lot for people that listen to music all day every day at work.

Google was famously really resistant to ads at first. They wanted to do a subscription service of some kind, but honestly ads just brought in so much more revenue even back then that it was a nigh-inevitable decision. It produces a crazy amount of economy.

I still loathe ads though.

Imagine your last thing in your mind being an ad about mongoDB.

I actually find those amusing because they just make me remember the 'web scale' meme.

It's kind of wild how you have so many ads targeted at devs in SF.

It’s like all the ads at airports clearly aimed at C-level execs.

And those in Brussels are all by American giants that want EU bureaucrats to know they take privacy seriously.

They know their market. :)

Thanks for that thought. Horrible.

> it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.

Oh, the self driving car business will get there, believe me. This is just the first iteration. Designed to get everybody on board with the idea.

I wonder if Waymo gets a cut. I also wonder if riding in a Waymo at the time signals that you're in a demographic that can afford a Waymo and thus get more expensive ads.

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