Waze to begin serving location based ads

Darren

Waze, the social navigation and driving app, is launching location based advertising.

As the adage goes "if the app is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” And so it was inevitable that, with a claimed base of 30 million users, it was only a matter of time before the company mobilised to monetize the service.

Businesses can advertise with Waze and pay to have their business shown to passing drivers with a branded pin displayed on the map.

Location based advertising has been something of a holy grail for a long time now. It was seen as the next big money spinner for navigation companies but, to date, no-one has managed to implement ads successfully.

It remains to be seen if Waze will be the first to make location based advertising pay. They'll need to strike a balance so that the ads are seen as a positive benefit for its customers instead of a turn off. Meanwhile advertisers will want to see proof that this kind of advertising medium is effective.

What are your thoughts. Could this be a useful addition to navigation or will it be intrusive and unwelcome?

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Darren Griffin

proctog · Regular Visitor Joined: Oct 28, 2004 Posts: 100

What a shame, just when I was starting to use Waze more.

Back to TomTom then ...

Guivre46 · Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2012 11:35 am Post subject:

I was wondering if TT places was so restricted because they were aiming at getting businesses to pay to be listed? So I think this is the way it is going to go for all apps.
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MaFt · Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2012 12:18 pm Post subject:

I don't think it's a shame, I just think it was inevitable.

You can't have such a good product for free - people need paying somewhere along the line.

MaFt

DennisN · Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2012 6:14 pm Post subject:

Next headline.....

proctog · Regular Visitor Joined: Oct 28, 2004 Posts: 100

I'm not averse to paying, I am averse to ads though. If they offer a "premium" version that costs money but doesn't involve ads, I'll sign up straight away.

Glenn.

Jaz666 · Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2012 12:06 am Post subject:

Waze briefly trialled this in the UK last year, and it wasn't intrusive.

The Waze map interface does not show POIs like Tom Tom or Garmin units do, so all that happened was a POI icon appeared for the business (a well known second hand car purchasing firm if I recall), and tapping on that brought up the advert.
I would be very surprised if adverts started to pop-up whilst driving.

I've mentioned this in forum posts about Waze before, but their main business model so far has been re-selling their data to third parties, such as their crowd sourced traffic data to several local news networks in America.

xtraseller · Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2012 9:14 am Post subject:

I'm surprised people are surprised Laughing Out Loud

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Dippy · Regular Visitor Joined: Apr 04, 2006 Posts: 124

Having used Waze on and off for years, it's never been a usable product (for me). I find it can't do a simple A to B without some craziness.

I have a standard route I test it on - my house to the supermarket, which is 9 miles along one road. That's the only sensible way to get there. It consistently picks a 56 mile diversion that ends up approaching the supermarket from the other direction. I've been a Waze editor and "fixed" the route numerous times, and a new editor has as well. Nope. 56 miles to the supermarket. Been like it for at least two years or more.

With that kind of nonsense it's never going to be a serious player, even for free.

Probably great in Israel and parts of London. Where there aren't many users it's poor, and where it's poor there won't be many users, so nobody will see the ads anyway. Give it (yet another) five years...

TieJustice · Lifetime Member Joined: Mar 24, 2005 Posts: 66

Waze WAS good at one time, but now with NO rerouting it's just a sat nav IF you have a 3G connection if not its just a app that dose not work.

it says it will help you avoid traffic jams by rerouting around them *** THAT'S NOT TRUE *** ask any one on the M5 at Birmingham where the road works are it will insist that you stay in the traffic jam and not take the route around this problem.

It has been updated by users so it has on average 2 errors if you do a trip that's off the main routes. You can report the errors but more or less you'll get a email saying they can not fix it so you'll have to ???

So this app has been mostly done by users free, updated by users free, so should stay add free.

There are a lot of free satnav apps that are free that work.

I'll just stay with my Garmin free maps for life traffic info and best of all just say the words " say command" and I can navigate to any where in the world find a POI or phone a number that is not in my contacts all without touching a single button truly hands free.
I don't see any apps that can do that ? Do you?

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