Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.
I’m pretty sure anyone that has any understanding of literally anything understands that businesses exist for one purpose – to make money. Corporations exist to grow. So, how do you do that when you’ve completely saturated the market? You sell more and screw more.
Now, a new report from Jalopnik takes a deeper look into the matter and the results are surprising, to say the least.
The numbers reported from Jalopnik are definitely higher than what Uber and Lyft reported
We knew Jalopnik was working on a report of this nature, as it sent a call to drivers asking for data regarding their rides and payments and now we’re started to see the fruits of that study.
Overall, the Jalopnik study looked at over 14,000 rides to get their numbers which, granted, is but a small percentage of the millions of rides taken through each service each day. There could be some bias here, as it’s possible only drivers unhappy with their earnings reported in, but it still gives some insight into what Uber and Lyft are doing.
From the data presented by Jalopnik:
- Uber took a 35% cut of rides, while Lyft took 38%
- When looking at only the receipts from drivers, Uber averaged 29.6% and Lyft averaged 34.5%
When reached for comment, neither Uber or Lyft would provide its share rates with drivers, but both numbers reported from Jalopnik are higher than those presented by the ridesharing companies. One example presented by Jalopnik showed a driver only making $15 on a $65 trip, but again, this very well could be an outlier.
Our own expert in cynicism and reality, Curtis, notes that “Silicon Valley always has been Wall Street, capitalism, just with a fresh coat of paint. The goal of any business is to make money, and usually, that means exploiting workers (to a point) for the gain of a few. Thanks to clever marketing and ‘disruption’ people act surprised when Silicon Valley does something that we would normally attribute to some other, non-shiny, corporation. And none of this would make consumers stop using the services. So nothing matters.”
If you are interested in learning more about the news, make sure to check out the full Jalopnik report.
What do you think? Surprised by the findings or is this expected? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.
Editors’ Recommendations:
- Instagram is working on a messaging app that’s basically Snapchat Lite
- Apple was working on a way for iPhone users to send texts to each other without cell service
- NeuralCam is the first Night Mode camera app for the iPhone and the results are incredible
- What happens when a passenger steals from their Uber driver? It turns out the answer is ‘nothing’
Follow us on Flipboard, Google News, or Apple News
