> 2, those companies already pay majority of their revenue to driver
I honestly have no clue what these companies major costs are. I've never really thought about it. A quick search seems to say that may not be the case, at least at Uber in 2019
Though I'm also not sure where drives are paid in this list, it seems to be "Operations and Support Expenses" but I may be wrong. This says "Cost of Revenue" and "General and Administrative expenses" are just over half.
There must be something with some better and more recent numbers that can explain where costs are for gig companies.
It has to do with revenue recognition. What the riders pay is not Uber's top line revenue, instead what the driver pays Uber back from that fare is. See Uber's 2019 annual financial report [1]. That amount you are thinking of as revenue is referred to as "Gross Bookings":
> Gross Bookings. We define Gross Bookings as the total dollar value, including any applicable taxes, tolls, and fees, of Rides and New Mobility rides, Eats meal deliveries, and amounts paid by Freight shippers (p. 61)
Uber's cut of the transactions is defined as the Take Rate, and was 21.4% in 2019. That means that 79.6% of the fares Uber collects was paid to drivers.
Well, there was a recent article which described how the bulk of Ubers ad spend was on click fraud or something like that, where canceling had no effect on business. That's money that could go to drivers.
I'm sure they also spend much more on hosting than they need to, because it doesn't often make business sense in the tech sector to spend a lot of developer time on cost reduction. When it doesn't, developers overall don't focus on reducing costs as much, and consequently, they're less skilled at it... to the benefit of cloud providers and to the slight (or sizeable? I'm unsure) detriment of our planet.
They are constantly experimenting with prices/payouts, and different areas have different rate so it's going to be hard to have a concrete number. But I believe Uber takes around 25% + a small fixed fee per ride.
I honestly have no clue what these companies major costs are. I've never really thought about it. A quick search seems to say that may not be the case, at least at Uber in 2019
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/05/31/wh...
Though I'm also not sure where drives are paid in this list, it seems to be "Operations and Support Expenses" but I may be wrong. This says "Cost of Revenue" and "General and Administrative expenses" are just over half.
There must be something with some better and more recent numbers that can explain where costs are for gig companies.