At a recent investor meeting, the CEO of one of the big three public out of home companies said this: “There are no net new billboards being built in America right now so the supply is basically fixed.”

That claim didn’t seem right to us so we looked at our data.  We just finished updating our 2024 list North American out of home companies.  There were 414 roadside billboard companies in our list for which we have their total out of home faces for 2023 and 2022.    A face was a face, so we didn’t give more faces to a company that converted a display to digital.  Here’s what we found:

• 24% of the out of home companies in our sample grew their total display faces between 2022 and 2023 due to new builds and acquisitions.
• 66% of the out of home companies in our sample had a stable number of display faces between 2022 and 2023.
• 10% of the out of home companies in our sample had net display faces decline between 2022 and 2023 via divestitures or taking down poor locations.
• The number of total roadside display faces for the 414 out of home companies in our sample increased by a net of 10,065 or 3%.  Looks to Billboard Insider like there are net new billboards being built in the US.

What’s your experience?  Take our poll below or email comments to davewestburg@billboardinsider.com.  We’ll do a followup with the results later this week.  We are asking about display faces not flips.  A digital faces counts as 1.  A static face counts as 1.  A conversion of a sign from static to digital, therefore, does not increase the number of displays by 7.

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