An independent buyer's desk for NYC outdoor (OOH) advertising
Out-of-home advertising in New York City, from the buyer's side of the desk
New York sells seven kinds of out-of-home (OOH) advertising: Times Square screens, billboards and wallscapes, MTA subway and bus, taxi tops, street furniture, LinkNYC kiosks and vehicle wraps. This desk reports who sells each, how its audience is counted and who regulates it, using the MTA, the TLC, OAAA and the Zoning Resolution. No figure here is any operator's rate.
Counted, not repeated
Four primary counts a planner can put in a deck. Each is the publishing body's own figure, not a vendor's round number.
The five guides
Each one opens with the answer, then shows its working, and ends with the brief. Start with the question you are being asked.
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01
Who sells the Times Square screens, and what do they cost?
Times Square billboards: who sells the screens, what they cost and how the crowd is counted
Fifteen companies sell time on the screens. The two published rate guides disagree by three times on the same board, and the pedestrian count under every CPM is 220,000 or 360,000 depending on who you ask.
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02
Who sells the subway, and how many people actually ride it?
New York subway advertising: who sells the MTA, what the units are and how riders are counted
One company, OUTFRONT Media, sells every MTA subway ad under a concession running to 2030. Its page says 2.6 billion rides a year; the MTA's own count for 2025 is 1,281,883,362 subway rides.
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03
Why are there so few billboards in Manhattan, and who owns the ones that exist?
Billboards in New York City: who owns them, why zoning decides where they stand, and what the published rates say
Zoning keeps new advertising signs 200 feet from every arterial highway, which is why Manhattan has so few boards. Three national operators and one street-furniture franchisee sell most of them; none prints a price.
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04
Which formats can be bought in New York at all, and how does each one differ?
Advertising in New York City: what you can buy, who sells it, how it is counted and who regulates it
Seven formats, five regulators, four counting methods. One table with who sells each format, how its audience is counted, who writes its rules, the typical buy unit and where it loses.
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05
Whose paper are you actually signing?
NYC out-of-home directory: the sellers, verified one by one
The companies that sell out-of-home in New York City, checked against what each one actually controls: the owners and concessionaires, and the marketplaces that resell their inventory.
Campaigns that actually ran in New York
Not stock photography. These are documented frames from an operator's campaign archive, used with permission: 935 catalogued New York shots across 237 brands. Each one is captioned with the brand, the format, the location and the year it ran.
Campaign photograph from an operator's archive, used with permission.
What to send us
- The market, or the boroughs
- The dates, or the flight length
- The budget band
- The metric you will judge it by
A person replies with the sellers and formats that fit and the published ranges for them. No rate card exists on this site; every figure here is a third-party published number.
Brief received.
It is in the queue and will be read by a person. Expect a reply with questions rather than a quote.
Describe the New York campaign
Market, timing and the format decision still open. A person reads every brief and replies with questions, not a rate card.