Amazon makes 14 cents from every Lyft ride
I don&#x27;t think the title is a fair representation of what&#x27;s going on.  Hear me out.<p>The way it&#x27;s phrased, it&#x27;s like each ride directly translates into 14 more cents for Amazon.  But really, the figure comes from averaging Lyft&#x27;s Amazon costs over Lyft&#x27;s total rides.<p>Now, in <i>some</i> cases, that would be valid accounting, if <i>all</i> (or nearly all) of your costs (with respect to that service) are variable. For example, most of the cost of sending a letter is the truck&#x2F;plane&#x2F;employee, which are variable, so it makes sense to divide total letters over total truck etc costs.<p>But would Lyft pay twice as much to Amazon if they served twice as many rides?  Would they have to double <i>every</i> AWS service they&#x27;re buying?  I don&#x27;t think so. They might have to add more of one or two kinds of server&#x2F;services, but most of that 14 cents figure comes from amortizing fixed costs, which will go down if they scale up further.<p>Am I off base here?