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I bought a billboard to explain billboards

Phil Edwards | June 17, 2026



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Alaska highway by: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Autopista_Taylor,_Chicken,_Alaska,_Estados_Unidos,_2017-08-28,_DD_102.jpg

Vermont Highway by:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vermont_Route_26.jpg

Hawaii highway by:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021-10-09_08_23_49_View_south_along_Hawaii_State_Route_190_(Hawaii_Belt_Road-Mamaloa_Highway)_just_south_of_Hawaii_State_Route_200_(Daniel_K._Inouye_Highway)_in_Pu%27uanahulu,_Hawaii_County,_Hawaii.jpg

Maine highway by:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maine_highway_9_heading_east.jpg

Billboards cost real money: this one is $8,000 for four weeks. Why did billboards win and can we ever get our roadsides back? I test the market, compare prices ($850, $4,850, $5,000 for four weeks), and look at Lamar Advertising—the local giant claiming the largest digital billboard footprint, with 159,000 billboards and 5,000 digital billboards playing 10-second ad slots 24/7. We talk out-of-home advertising (OOH) rates, audience reach, and how ads are “arranged to reach consumers in every walk of life” as they go about daily tasks. Keywords: billboard cost, digital billboard, Lamar Advertising, OOH, out of home ads, billboard pricing, 10-second slots, four-week flight, CPM, impressions.

From wall posters and sky-signs to standardized poster panels, the industry professionalized fast. City beautification movements pushed against sniping and illegal pasting, and companies responded by leasing sites and consolidating power. We trace the rise of the Out-of-Home Advertising Association (founded 1891), catalogs of glues and frames, the shift from dense urban foot traffic to streetcar suburbs, then highways, and the promise of “scientifically placed” panels. We measure audience patterns by hour, traffic counts, and why repetition works. Keywords: billboard history, sky signs, city beautification, standardization, OAAA 1891, streetcar suburbs, highways, audience measurement, traffic counts, frequency, repetition, advertising effectiveness.

Regulation tried to catch up. Along federal highways, sign controls, the 1958 bonus incentives, and Lady Bird Johnson’s push culminated in the Highway Beautification Act—rules, 660-foot control zones, grandfathered signs, junkyard screening, and a wave of consolidation. Some states ban off-premise billboards (Alaska, Vermont, Hawaii, Maine), but everywhere else the marketplace expands: gas stations, pharmacies, groceries, and more digital OOH surfaces. We weigh the trade: public views monetized, tax revenue arguments, and whether we can regulate the screens we live with. Keywords: Highway Beautification Act, Lady Bird Johnson, federal highway regulation, billboard bans, grandfathered signs, consolidation, digital out-of-home, roadside ads, tax revenue, regulation vs. blight.

Written by Phil Edwards

Comments

This post currently has 33 comments.

  1. @melissaharkins22

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    First, $8k for a billboard is VERY rare outside of your markets like New York, LA, Houston, etc on road where millions (traffic patterns measured every year). Even a city like Atlanta, a rare few are even close to that high. If it’s close to that is smaller area, there must be not be other boards available or existing within a very wide range. Also, an initial quote isn’t where it ends up isn’t a good figure to reference for billboard costs. Your looking at 1/4 to 1/2 is most mid size markets.
    Cost to impressions delivered are incomparable. You buy online ads and pay at least $10 per 1,000 impressions. On radio even more. They get to control how often and where your ad displays. They can minimize that delivery to give you the lowest price, but you need to have reach a certain frequency and reach for your ad to be effective. In a market like Savannah, you could be paying $2500/month to reach 200k views per week.
    All media has it’s place and I don’t like speaking negatively of any type because it’s no apples to apples, but billboards seem to get judged unfairly the most harshly. Some complain about having to see billboards on their commute a couple hours idea, but don’t complain as much about the number of ads scrolling their social media feed, which is a lot more often than time spent on their phone. Everyone has a right to their opinion billboards, but to talk about one on the highest end of rates isn’t really a fair angle.

  2. @SlaughterDog

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    I had to check how “YouTube” is stylized after seeing it as “Youtube” on your billboard. I want to see more ads in expensive places that look like they were slapped together by Aunt Megan who calls herself a graphic designer because she bought Corel Paint Shop Pro in the early ‘00s and was told her art was 'really good' by the librarian back in community college.

  3. @deborahd.6228

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    😂'Kept waiting for a mention of 'Burma Shave' If you search here on youtube one of the videos is something like 'When Burma Shave was The Rave' There are also books compiling the Burma Shave roadside smaller billboards that had separate stanzas of a humorous rhyme that drivers and their passengers could watch for as they drove along long stretches of roads in the 1950's (of course when gas was cheap!) 'Learned of this studying marketing.

  4. @mannyja

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    I live in Columbia, MD, which is located between Baltimore and D.C. There are no signs for businesses like McDonald's or billboards anywhere. Businesses are required to wait until the weekend to put up minor signs.

  5. @julioaurelio

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    "No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn't). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake… and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement.

    Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

    Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product." – Jan Koum

  6. @loganv33

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    In 2000 Missouri had a ballot proposition to ban new billboards. In the run-up to the election, companies like Lamar built a bunch of new billboards in case the measure passed. But it failed 49/51. So all we got was a bunch of new billboards, many of them blank.

  7. @EdGreenTO

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    I found it odd to hear the guy on the billboard, asking for people to watch his content, tell us that the public gets nothing from the billboard ads. As much as I don't want to defend gaudy advertisements everywhere, there's surely value to having a plain way for anyone with enough "resources" to put out a public message. I for one got something out of this content, great vid.

  8. @AdrianHereToHelp

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    Hearing him say "if you don't know", then being hit with a Patreon plug (instead of an explanation that this is a personal channel) was a strange feeling lol
    (Not in a bad way; I just started autofilling with what the old outro was and then got surprised by it being different)

  9. @markdmeadows

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    I recognized exactly where this billboard is immediately. I used to drive past it on my commute but moved to a different part of RVA a couple months ago, so I have not seen your ad. I guess since I'm already a subscriber it doesn't matter!

  10. @DanielRuoso

    June 17, 2026 at 12:35 am

    It's interesting to contrast this story with what the city of São Paulo did, banning all billboards from the entire city. Which ended up resulting in probably the biggest collection of building-sized murals in the world.

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