Billboards Are Dead? The Numbers Tell a Very Different Story
Every few years, someone declares out-of-home advertising obsolete. The data keeps refusing to cooperate.
TRAILHEAD MEDIA · OUT-OF-HOME, OUT LOUD
If you spend any time around marketing, you’ve heard the eulogy. Streaming killed the TV spot, the internet killed print, and somewhere in there — the story goes — the billboard quietly died too.
It’s a confident take. It’s also one of the most wrong takes in all of advertising.
Because while the “billboards are dead” narrative gets repeated at conference after conference, out-of-home keeps doing something dead things don’t do: it keeps growing. Here’s what the numbers actually say.
A Medium That's Been “Dying” for a Century
Out-of-home advertising was here before radio. It was here before television. It was here before the internet. Every technology that was supposed to bury it simply became one more screen people eventually learned to tune out.
And through all of it, out-of-home didn’t just survive — it expanded. U.S. out-of-home revenue reached a record $9.46 billion in 2025, up 3.6% year over year, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA). That capped 19 consecutive quarters of growth — a streak of nearly five straight years.
The streak has only lengthened since. Q1 2026 delivered an all-time first-quarter high of $2.12 billion, up 7.1% year over year, extending the run to 20 straight quarters. Digital out-of-home grew 12.9% and now accounts for 36% of total revenue. That’s not the trajectory of a dying medium. That’s the trajectory of one the market keeps voting for.
And it isn’t a handful of nostalgic buyers propping it up. In 2025, 70% of the top 100 out-of-home advertisers increased their spending year over year, and technology and digitally native brands now make up 28% of that top 100, per the OAAA’s MegaBrands report. Sixteen percent of that top 100 more than doubled their investment year over year.
When both legacy giants and digital-first brands keep pouring in more money, it’s worth asking why.
The One Ad You Can't Skip
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for the rest of the advertising world: audiences have never been better at avoiding ads.
Roughly a third of internet users now run ad blockers — about 32.5% in the U.S. as of 2025, according to GWI — and by some measures nearly half of American consumers have installed one at some point. Millions more pay monthly subscriptions specifically so they never see a commercial. The skip button has become a reflex. An enormous share of the modern ad economy is spent trying to reach people who are actively working not to be reached.
Then there’s the billboard.
You can’t skip it. You can’t block it. You can’t pay five dollars a month to make it disappear. It doesn’t need your email, your cookies, or your permission. It simply exists in the physical world, reaching everyone who passes.
In an era defined by ad avoidance, that unavoidability isn’t a quaint holdover — it’s one of the rarest and most valuable assets in the entire media landscape.
The Numbers Advertisers Actually Care About
Reach means little without efficiency, and this is where out-of-home quietly wins.
Start with cost. According to Solomon Partners’ 2025 Major Media CPM Comparison, roadside billboards deliver a cost per thousand impressions of roughly $3 to $10 — well below streaming video (about $23–$34), broadcast TV (about $24–$27), and newspapers (as high as $54). That’s not a marginal difference. That’s out-of-home reaching audiences at a fraction of the cost of the channels it’s supposedly losing to.
| Medium | Typical CPM |
|---|---|
| Out-of-home (roadside billboards) | $3 – $10 |
| Magazines | $13 – $14 |
| Podcasts | $18 – $25 |
| Streaming / connected TV video | $23 – $34 |
| Broadcast television | $24 – $27 |
| Newspapers | $40 – $54 |
Source: Solomon Partners, 2025 Major Media CPM Comparison, via Billboard Insider.
Now add memorability. Billboards post one of the highest recall rates of any medium. Solomon Partners’ U.S. Major Media Advertising Effectiveness Analysis, released with the OAAA, aggregated ad recall studies published between 2017 and 2022 and found out-of-home producing the highest consumer recall of the channels compared — the widely cited figure is 86%, ahead of live and streaming television, podcasts, radio, print, and online formats. Separately, an OAAA and Morning Consult survey found 79% of U.S. adults noticed a billboard in the past 30 days. Cheaper to reach people, and they actually remember it afterward. For a medium supposedly on its deathbed, that’s a remarkably healthy set of vital signs.
Follow the Smart Money
If the data isn’t convincing enough on its own, watch behavior — because behavior is the most honest data there is.
Look at who’s buying out-of-home. In 2025, Apple was the single largest out-of-home advertiser in the country, and Amazon, Google, and a wave of other technology and digitally native brands ranked among the top spenders, according to the OAAA’s MegaBrands report. The most data-driven, digitally native companies ever built — organizations with every analytics tool imaginable at their fingertips — are putting real money on physical billboards. They aren’t doing it for nostalgia. They’re doing it because it works, and because their own numbers tell them so.
When the companies that defined the digital age keep buying the oldest medium in advertising, the “billboards are dead” thesis gets very hard to defend.
What It Actually Means
The honest read of the data is the opposite of the headline. Out-of-home isn’t a relic hanging on by habit. In a world where every other ad can be skipped, blocked, targeted into oblivion, or lost in an endless feed, the billboard has quietly become one of the most efficient, most trusted, and most unavoidable ways to reach real people in the real world.
At Trailhead, we’ve built our business on that conviction — not because we’re sentimental about the medium, but because the numbers keep proving it out.
Billboards aren’t dead. They may be the last ad standing.
Curious what that looks like for your own business? Browse available inventory or learn more about selling your billboards to Trailhead Media.
Sources
— OAAA, “Out of Home Advertising Revenue Reaches Record $9.46 Billion,” March 2026.
— OAAA, “OOH Hits New First Quarter High as Revenue Reaches $2.12 Billion,” June 3, 2026.
— OAAA, “Apple, Verizon, Coca-Cola Lead OOH’s Top Advertisers” (2025 MegaBrands report), April 2026.
— Solomon Partners, 2025 Major Media CPM Comparison, via Billboard Insider, November 2025.
— GWI ad-blocker usage data (2025), via Backlinko / DataReportal.
— Solomon Partners with OAAA, U.S. Major Media Advertising Effectiveness Analysis, January 2023 (aggregating studies published 2017–2022).
— OAAA and Morning Consult, “Out of Home Advertising Study,” March 2023.
— EMARKETER, “Out-of-home ad spend surpasses $9B, driven by digital growth” (OAAA interview).
Want the Full Data Behind This?
Download the full Out-of-Home Performance Report for the complete breakdown of cost, recall, and reach across today’s media landscape — growth trends, CPM comparisons, recall data, and who’s actually buying out-of-home in 2026. Just tell us where to send it.