The state of DOOH pricing, to the cent.

How the index is measured

Two rules keep it honest. First, the index is aggregate only: it publishes city-and-format medians and floors, never a single operator's rates. Second, a suppression rule drops any city-and-format cell with fewer than 10 active screens, because small cells can be reverse-engineered to one operator. The floor column is the lowest listed play in a cell; some cheap residential and elevator screens list below five cents, shown as "under $0.05". The median is the trustworthy central figure and the one to plan against. Prices and availability change continuously, so treat the index as the market's shape, and read the live price on any screen before you book.

Because the unit is one real appearance on one screen, a budget of any size spends only on plays that actually run, with no filler baked into the price, so the index reads the same whether you are planning a corner shop's month or a global launch.

Per-play prices, 24 cities

Median listed price per play from live Blindspot inventory, Q3 2026. The format shown is the most representative for that city. The peak premium is the average commuter-hour uplift; busy transit lines run higher.

Screens-weighted medians from live Blindspot inventory, Q3 2026, rounded to the cent. Where a city has denser inventory in another format, its own screen cards carry that price. For the European deep dive see the Europe cost guide, and for the wider primer the billboard cost guide.

Five things the data shows

1. A DOOH play spans two orders of magnitude. The same product, one ad appearance on one screen, ranges from about $0.04 on San Francisco urban panels to $3.19 on Singapore airport screens, and up to around $40 on a Times Square spectacular. Format and city matter more than any single rate card.
2. Urban panels are the value format. In almost every city, street-level urban panels are the cheapest premium screens, from about $0.03 in Berlin and Munich. They are where a small budget goes furthest.
3. New York is the priciest major US market at a median of about $2.81 a billboard play, ahead of Melbourne ($2.52) and Sydney ($1.75). European capitals are markedly cheaper per play: Berlin and London urban screens sit from $0.03 to $0.17.
4. Peak hours cost more, but not everywhere equally. The commuter-hour premium averages 1.0 to 1.7 times off-peak, topping out in Lisbon, Toronto and London. Because each screen is bought by the hour, that premium is a choice, not a tax.
5. There is no CPM floor and no minimum. The unit is the play, priced from $0.23 on urban screens, with no thousand-impression block or four-week flight to buy in. That is why a real campaign can start for a few hundred dollars.

A note on CPM-equivalents

The out-of-home industry usually quotes CPM, the cost per thousand impressions. This index is in per-play prices instead, because that is the unit you actually buy and pay for on Blindspot: one appearance on one screen, shown before booking. A play is a fact you can audit; a CPM is a forecast.

If you need a CPM-equivalent to line a DOOH plan up against a paid-social or programmatic plan, it can be derived from two numbers: the per-play price in this index and the audience each screen reports per play. The conversion is the per-play price divided by the audience per play, multiplied by a thousand. We do not publish a single blended CPM here because audience per play varies enormously by screen, and one number would hide that. Every screen on the platform shows both its per-play price and its reported audience, so you can compute the comparison for the exact screens in your plan rather than trusting an average.

Cite this page

This index is free to cite with attribution. If you are writing about DOOH pricing, a suggested line: "Per-play DOOH prices range from about $0.04 to $3.19 across 24 major cities, with a median near $0.52 a play (Blindspot State of DOOH Pricing, Q3 2026)." A link to this page is appreciated.