Meta Has 10 Million Advertisers. Billboards Have 200,000.
Meta has 10 million advertisers. Out-of-home has 200,000. The gap was never demand. Here is what happened when a billboard company let small businesses in.
Meta has around 10 million advertisers. The whole out-of-home industry, every billboard company on earth, has about 200,000 customers.
Fifty times fewer. Mark Catterall, who runs Smart Outdoor, put that gap on LinkedIn in August after hearing it at the World Out of Home Congress. His question was simple. Do 49 out of 50 businesses not want to be seen in public? Or have they never been given a way in?
We have thousands of bookings to go on.
Nobody counts the small buyers
Try to find out how many British businesses have ever bought a billboard. You cannot. Outsmart, the trade body, reports revenue (£1.44bn in 2025), not customers. Nielsen's spend data comes from buying agencies, so, as Catterall points out in his write-up, it excludes anything bought directly from a billboard owner.
Catterall puts around 85% of that £1.44bn through a handful of specialist agencies. If you are not on an agency plan, you are invisible to the numbers the industry publishes. The cafe, the dance school, the bloke who does gutters: none of them show up, so nobody notices they are missing.
It was never a demand problem
The usual explanation is that small businesses do not want billboards. The old way to book one is to email a stranger, wait for a rate card, agree a minimum spend and give three weeks' notice. Most small businesses never got as far as the email.
Catterall's estimate is that there are roughly 28,500 businesses within sight of Smart Outdoor's billboards. Selling to them the traditional way, with a salesperson and a phone call, would take about 190 people. The sums have never worked for anyone, so nobody has ever tried. Nobody refused the small end of the market. Nobody could reach it.
So Smart Outdoor stopped trying to reach it with people. Since the middle of 2025 their billboards have been bookable on FameCake, and many more billboard companies have joined since. Upload a picture, pick a billboard, pay. No rate card and no minimum spend.
What happened when the door opened
Thousands of ads have been booked through FameCake so far. Since January 2026, most bookings and the large majority of revenue have come from businesses, across thousands of live billboards.
None of them went through a FameCake salesperson. We do not have one.
Two things surprised us.
They come back
The objection everyone makes about self-serve billboards is that the buyers are tourists. Book once for the novelty, take the photo, never return.
Repeat customers now account for more than half of revenue. That is a book of business, and it built itself.
The tail has a head
Most ads are small. But larger bookings contribute a meaningful share of revenue, and a small group of customers has spent several hundred pounds each.
Every one of them found us. We did not find them.
The second layer
Big brands have always photographed their billboards. That is a marketing manager, a photographer and a sign-off.
This is different. People book the billboard, get in the car, drive to the site and take a photo standing under it. Catterall's write-up lists a Slimming World consultant in Leven, a cake maker in South Ayrshire, a dog wash in Carnoustie and a tattoo studio in Cardiff. None of them know each other, and they all do the same thing.
Then they post it to a few hundred people who actually know them. For these businesses a billboard was never on the table, so when it happens it is a milestone, and milestones get photographed. The billboard delivers its audience. Then the advertiser bolts a second one on top, carrying the most credible endorsement in advertising: I did this.
Why programmatic did not do this already
The industry has had self-serve and programmatic buying for years. Programmatic solved access for media buyers. It made billboards easier to buy if you already knew how to buy media: a trading desk, a CPM, an audience segment, artwork to spec, a minimum spend, a contract. Clever engineering, same fourteen doors.
The cake maker in Ayrshire needed a platform that assumed nothing about media buying. A smarter trading desk would not have helped her.
We did not out-engineer anyone here. The bar was on the floor. Booking takes a couple of minutes and starts at £10 a day.
Is the market growing, or just going digital?
Catterall's reading of the IAB's latest Compass report: UK digital out-of-home hit a record £964m, 67% of all billboard spend, up from 32% in 2015. But in 2015 total out-of-home was about £1.06bn. Ten years on it is £1.44bn. Allow for inflation and the total has barely moved. The billboards changed. Whether the list of buyers grew with them is the question he is asking.
In a follow-up post he argues the industry keeps pushing more money into London, Manchester and Birmingham, markets that are already full. The towns and high streets that never appear on a media plan are where the new money is. Social media grew by letting in millions of small businesses who could never afford an agency, and he thinks billboards can do the same.
On what we have seen since January, we think that is right. Catterall says most of those ads came from businesses that had never bought out-of-home before. If so, that is new money in out-of-home.
The caveats
Nine months of data is not a long run, and a handful of large bookings move the revenue share a lot.
We also cannot tell you how big the market behind that door is. Nobody counts it, which was rather the point.
What this means if you own billboards
A billboard company is only half a media owner. The other half is the route to market, and almost everyone built the first half and rented the second. The rented half only ever served the 200,000.
The millions of small businesses advertising on Meta are still there. Some of them are within sight of your billboards already, looking for somewhere local to appear. The platform exists, it is open to any operator, and it costs nothing until it sells something.
What this means if you run a business
You can book a billboard near your shop tonight, for about the price of a round of coffees, and it can be live tomorrow. Then go and stand under it.
Sources
- Mark Catterall, "Has OOH's biggest problem been solved", LinkedIn, August 2026. The WOO Congress figures, the 85% agency share, the 28,500 businesses and 190 salespeople, and the Nielsen methodology note are in the write-up attached to that post.
- Mark Catterall, "The numbers behind our self-serve journey so far", LinkedIn, August 2026. The claim that most ads came from first-time out-of-home buyers is in the deck attached to that post.
- Mark Catterall on the IAB UK Compass DOOH report, LinkedIn, August 2026
- Outsmart, UK out-of-home revenue 2025
- FameCake platform data, paid bookings, 1 January to 17 September 2026
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