DOOH companies, ranked by category: what each owns, how it is measured, how it is bought

Digital out of home companies fall into five groups: mobility operators, roadside digital owners, place-based networks, transit concessionaires, and the SSPs and DSPs that trade all of them. This list ranks 24 of them by four stated criteria: what each owns, how its inventory is measured, which platforms sell it, and what it publishes about lift.

Most "top DOOH companies" pages are directories with numbers on them. They put a demand-side platform next to a billboard owner next to a gym-television network and call the result a ranking, when the three do not sell the same thing, are not measured the same way and are not bought through the same pipe. A buyer who wants a screen on a taxi in Boston learns nothing from where Lamar sits on such a list.

So this one ranks inside categories, against the criteria stated below. Every line uses only what the company states on its own site or in its own SEC filing, read on September 14, 2026. Where a company states nothing, the line says so, and that costs it places. The category map itself, who owns versus who resells versus who plans, is on outdoor advertising companies; this page is the ranked, digital-only companion to it.

Disclosure: the editor of this site is employed by Firefly, which appears in this list. The ranking rules below apply to every company, Firefly included, and links to Firefly are tagged sponsored.

How this list is ranked

Five criteria. Four of them move a company up or down; the fifth is recorded because buyers keep asking for it and the answer is the same for all 24.

Order of the categories is by how close the inventory sits to the street: screens that move first, fixed roadside second, venues third, transit fourth, then the software that sells all of them. That is this site's lens, stated openly. A buyer whose brief is airports would order it differently.

How to read this list: owner, platform, agency

Three kinds of company appear below and only one of them owns anything you can photograph. An owner (Firefly, Lamar, GSTV, Intersection) operates screens, a fleet or a concession and sells occupancy of it. A platform (Place Exchange, Vistar, The Trade Desk) owns software and sells access to other people's screens; it takes a share of the media that flows through it. An agency (Billups, Talon, Rapport) owns neither and sells planning and negotiation. Agencies are not ranked here, because the criteria are about inventory, and they hold none. The best DOOH companies for a brief are the ones that own what the brief needs and can show how it is measured; a list cannot know your brief, which is why this one shows its working. The money flow between the three, and what each layer costs you in certainty, is drawn on the role map.

One more distinction matters for the measurement column. A fixed panel has an audited location, so Geopath can model its audience from traffic past that spot. A screen on a vehicle does not, so its audience comes from the unit's own GPS log and a device-location panel, a different method producing a different kind of number. Why the two should not share a spreadsheet column is on how out-of-home impressions are measured.

1. Mobility DOOH operators

Screens that ride on taxis, rideshare cars and inside the cabin. This is the category the site's archive documents, so it is also where the ranking is easiest to check against photographs. Firefly ranks first on the criteria, not on familiarity: it is the only operator in the group whose own pages name five SSPs and three dated third-party studies. That said, it is one of five names, and the other four are described in exactly the same terms.

Three things stand out in that table. TaxiTV is a name two companies use for in-car video on their own pages, Curb for its network of "15K+" screens and Firefly for the product its in-car page dates to 2007; SOMO sells a third TaxiTV count. The word is a format label as much as a brand, and a buyer should ask which fleet and which city before comparing the numbers. Second, the two rideshare platforms are moving in opposite directions: Uber's current surfaces page lists in-car JourneyTV but no longer the car-top ads its 2022 launch named, and Lyft's live site sells car wraps, bikeshare panels and in-app placements with no vehicle screen at all, which is why Lyft is in the "not on the list" note further down rather than in the table. Third, none of the five names Geopath. The audited-location model was built for structures, so a moving operator that quoted a Geopath number would be quoting the wrong method; the honest ones describe the GPS and device-panel method instead, and Firefly's on-car page and measurement page do that most explicitly.

On lift, the gap is wide. Firefly's LoopMe brand study and its two Reveal studies are the only dated, partner-named results in the category. Uber's 98% completion rate is a delivery statistic, not a lift figure, and its Kantar results are stated without numbers. That is why the ranking within the category is not close, and why the same criteria would reorder it the day another operator publishes a study with a partner's name and a date on it. What a brand lift study has to contain to be worth reading is on brand lift study.

2. Roadside digital owners

Digital bulletins and spectaculars on structures the company owns. Counts here are the most reliable on the page because three of the four file them with the SEC. Ranked by stated digital billboards; the airport and transit screens the same owners run are counted separately in category 4.

Two filings tell you more about this category than any ranked list. Lamar's 5,500 digital billboards are about 3.5% of its roughly 159,300 billboard displays and earn about a third of its billboard revenue. Clear Channel Outdoor says digital is about 8% of its inventory and 44% of its revenue. Digital is where the money is, and the owners are converting as fast as permitting allows: OUTFRONT built or converted 103 in 2025, Clear Channel added 71. Programmatic is still small inside it. Lamar puts the channel at 2% of its outdoor business, which should temper any pitch that says the billboard market is now bought through a DSP. Most of it is booked by phone, four weeks at a time. The mechanics of the part that is not are on programmatic DOOH.

Branded Cities sits fourth because it states no count and names no SSP or measurement provider, not because its Harmon Corner wall is a lesser asset. That is how a stated-criteria list works: silence ranks below a number.

3. Place-based networks

Screens inside venues where people already are: gyms, fuel stations, office lobbies, charging bays. This is the largest digital category by unit on the OAAA's year-end 2025 count, 1,074,900 displays, and the one with the least consistent counting. Zoom Media counts screens, GSTV counts locations, Captivate counts displays and venues, JOLT counts states. Ranked by the largest stated figure, with that caveat attached.

GSTV is the clearest disclosure on the whole page for the third criterion: four SSPs and seventeen DSPs named, four deal types defined, on a single public page. Ask every other company on this list for the same page and notice who cannot produce one. On measurement, the venue networks lean on syndicated audience panels (Comscore for GSTV) or unnamed "third-party verification" rather than Geopath, because Geopath's audited-location model was built for the roadside. A venue impression and a roadside impression are both modelled, from different inputs.

4. Transit digital

Screens sold under a concession from a transit authority, plus the street kiosks that share the sidewalk with them. The owner does not own the structure here; it holds a contract to sell on it, under the authority's content rules. Ranked by stated digital display count.

OUTFRONT's 29,493 digital transit displays dwarf its 1,928 digital billboards, and the MTA obligation alone, 5,433 platform screens and 15,896 in-car screens, is larger than any roadside digital network in the country. Note the 6,505 displays reserved for agency use: a transit screen count on a sales deck may include units that never carry an ad. Which company holds which system, and each authority's content standard, is on subway advertising. For a brief that needs the same commuters at street level rather than on the platform, the mobility operators in category 1 run the neighbourhoods those stations sit in; Firefly's 15-market list and the transit concessions above overlap in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and Atlanta; its product range is on its advertising solutions page.

5. Supply and demand platforms

Software, no screens. A supply-side platform connects owners' inventory to buyers; a demand-side platform buys across owners against an audience. Size claims here are self-reported on incompatible definitions (screens, markets, DSP connections), so the ranking uses a criterion this page can actually verify: how many of the operators above name the platform on their own pages as a route to buy.

Supply-side platforms

Demand-side platforms

The platform layer consolidated in two years. Perion bought Hivestack (December 2023), Broadsign bought OutMoove (May 2024) and then Place Exchange (November 2025), and T-Mobile bought Vistar Media, so two of the five SSPs above now share an owner with something else on this list: Vistar with the Octopus in-car network, VIOOH with JCDecaux. That is not a conflict a buyer needs to avoid, but it is one to know about when a platform recommends inventory. The DV360 help page is worth reading before any programmatic DOOH plan for a different reason: it states plainly that DOOH creative is static image or standard video only, and that delivery can take a day. The deal types themselves, and what a bid request for a screen actually contains, are on programmatic DOOH.

What none of them publishes

A rate card. Not one of the 24 has a public price page, and this site does not fill the gap; every figure on it is a third-party published number. The second thing almost none of them publishes is a dated first-party lift study with the measurement partner's name on it. Across the 16 owners and operators above, the count is three studies from one mobility operator and one benchmark average from one roadside owner. Everyone else quotes an industry figure or says "robust measurement". The phrase is not evidence. If a vendor cannot tell you which company measured the lift, when, and against what control, the number on the deck is a decoration.

Context for how much of the market this is: the OAAA's March 17, 2026 release put US out-of-home revenue at $9.46 billion for 2025, with digital 36.3% of it and growing 10.5% against 3.6% for the category. The companies above are most of that 36.3%, and between them they have published four lift results.

Who is not on the list, and why

• Lyft Ads. Its live site sells in-app placements, car wrap branding and bikeshare branding, and runs programmatic through The Trade Desk, Microsoft Curate and DV360 for "CTV, online video, and display". No vehicle screen appears on any page read, so it is not a digital out-of-home company on its own description, whatever earlier products were called.
• Managed-service agencies (Billups, Talon, Rapport). They own no screens, so the criteria do not apply. They are compared on outdoor advertising companies.
• Yahoo DSP. Named by Curb, GSTV and Uber; its own DOOH page was not read for this list, so it is not ranked.
• Anything counted from trade press. SOMO's reported Las Vegas expansion, Octopus's reported screen totals and Vistar's reported screen count all exist in trade coverage and not on the companies' own pages this desk could read, so they are left out rather than repeated.

The list will be re-read against the same criteria when the pages change. A company that publishes a count, a partner name or a dated study moves up on the next pass; the criteria do not.

Where to go next

For the categories as formats rather than companies, start with the guide to out-of-home advertising and what is DOOH. For the sourced market figures behind the context above, out-of-home advertising statistics. To see the mobility category in the field, the campaign archive holds 3,783 photographed frames across 21 markets.