Place-based is twice the digital-billboard market

On 4 August, PQ Media released the 14th edition of its Global Digital Out-of-Home Media Forecast, and buried under a headline about elections and sport is the sentence that matters most to anyone building indoor screen inventory: digital place-based networks took $18.20 billion of global spend in 2025, against $9.28 billion for digital billboards and signage.

The industry’s mental image of DOOH is a roadside billboard. The money’s mental image is a screen inside a venue.

Key findings

Digital place-based networks: $18.20bn in 2025, +12.4% — the larger and faster-growing of the two DOOH segments (PQ Media — primary, syndicated forecast).
Digital billboards & signage: $9.28bn, +11.3% (PQ Media — primary).
Global DOOH grew 12% in 2025, decelerating from 15.5% in 2024; +15.3% forecast for 2026, on federal elections in 13 of the 20 largest markets plus the Winter Olympics and FIFA World Cup (PQ Media — primary; forecast component directional).
Market ranking: China $16.65bn (largest OOH market), US $14.64bn, +6.2% (second-largest, but 10th by growth); Australia fastest at +9.7%; 14 of the 20 leading markets grew double digits (PQ Media — primary).
Exposure: global OOH consumption 1.12 hours per week (+0.7%), of which DOOH is 40.6% (+6.7%); the US ranks 12th at 3.12 hours (PQ Media — primary, media-consumption basis).
Headwind named explicitly: tariff disputes and the Iran conflict, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, are delaying signage deliveries and raising the cost of new screens (PQ Media — primary).
The read: the segment beauty belongs to is not a niche inside DOOH; it is the majority of it, and its main brake right now is hardware logistics (BDOOH analysis).

What the numbers say

The split is the story. Two-to-one in favour of place-based, with place-based also growing faster, is a structural fact that most DOOH commentary gets backwards. It is consistent with what we argued in place-based is the fastest DOOH segment — but this edition puts an absolute dollar figure on both halves in the same table, which is rarer than it should be.

Worth noting why place-based is bigger: it counts screens in venues people are already inside — retail, transit hubs, offices, medical, fitness, entertainment, hospitality. PQ Media’s databook breaks out 11 indoor venue types. A billboard sells a road; a place-based network sells a room, and there are many more rooms than roads.

The 2026 acceleration is borrowed. A jump from 12% to 15.3% driven by elections, a Winter Olympics and a World Cup is a calendar effect, not a step change in structural demand. It inflates the base against which 2027 will be judged. Plan on the 12% trend line, not the 15.3% headline — the same discipline we apply in DOOH share of ad spend.

The hardware warning is the practical part. A forecaster naming supply-chain disruption and screen-cost inflation as a constraint on network expansion is telling operators something concrete: the panel you budgeted for last year may cost more and arrive later this year. For a small network, that lands directly on the launch plan.

What it means for beauty

Stop arguing that place-based is emerging. At $18.2bn it is the larger half of DOOH globally. That reframes the pitch in is beauty DOOH a fad or a category: the question isn’t whether venue screens are a real medium, it’s whether beauty venues have been assembled into buyable inventory yet. Our beauty DOOH market sizing is a slice of a proven $18bn segment, not a bet on a new one.
Venue-type accounting is how the money gets counted. Eleven indoor venue categories in the databook, and salons are not one of the headline ones — the same visibility gap we track through the OpenOOH Health & Beauty taxonomy and beauty venue screen penetration. Categories that get their own row get planned against.
Budget for hardware inflation now. If screens are getting more expensive and slower to land, the cost of starting a network moves, and so does payback. Lock specs early against the screen hardware spec benchmark and the hardware checklist, and re-run the network payback model with a longer lead time and a higher unit cost.
Geography still decides the opportunity. China largest, the US second but growing slowly, Australia fastest — that spread is why we keep market briefs per region and why best markets to start a beauty DOOH network doesn’t answer “the US” by default. The Asia-Pacific brief carries the density argument.

The caveat that keeps us honest

PQ Media is a syndicated commercial forecaster: the segment definitions are its own, the underlying databook is paywalled, and the figures are estimates reconciled across markets rather than transacted totals. “Digital place-based” as PQ Media defines it is broader than the venue set beauty sits in — it includes retail, transit, medical, fitness and hospitality networks at scale. Nothing here is a beauty figure. No beauty-venue spend, CPM or growth rate is published by PQ Media or asserted by us; there is still no reliable public beauty CPM, and our beauty sizing is built bottom-up from venue counts in the Research.

Sources

PQ Media — Global Digital Out-of-Home Media Forecast 2026–2030 (14th edition), announced 4 Aug 2026: digital place-based networks $18.20bn in 2025 (+12.4%); digital billboards & signage $9.28bn (+11.3%); global DOOH +12% in 2025 (from +15.5% in 2024) with +15.3% forecast for 2026 on elections, the Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup; China $16.65bn largest OOH market; US $14.64bn (+6.2%, 10th by growth); Australia fastest at +9.7%; 14 of 20 leading markets double-digit; OOH exposure 1.12 hrs/week globally with DOOH at 40.6% (+6.7%), US 12th at 3.12 hrs; supply-chain and tariff headwinds delaying signage deliveries. Report scope: 398-slide deck plus Excel databook covering 11 indoor venue types and outdoor locations. Primary as issuer-reported, directional as a forecast; underlying data paywalled and definitions proprietary. Secondary coverage: invidis, “PQ Media: Global Ad Spend to Accelerate in 2026,” 7 Aug 2026. No beauty-specific figure is asserted.