Cost guide
What outdoor advertising costs, and what moves it
A hoarding is priced as one structure at one spot, so the corridor, the direction it faces, the lighting and how long it has stood empty decide the number.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Outdoor advertising has no price, because you never buy outdoor advertising. You buy one structure, at one spot, facing one direction, free from a particular date. Five things set the number: the corridor, whether traffic halts there, whether it is lit after dark, the size of the panel, and how long it has stood empty. They move independently of each other. A seller who quotes you a rate per square foot without telling you which carriageway the site faces has not sold you a site. They have sold you a photograph.
What actually moves the price of a site
The corridor, and how fast traffic moves on it. The same panel is worth more where vehicles stop than where they pass. A signal, a toll queue, a school gate at the wrong hour: these give a driver forty seconds with your name in front of them. A free-flowing stretch gives them two. Media owners price the pause.
The direction of travel. A site faces one carriageway. The morning flow and the evening flow carry different people in different moods, and only one of them is going towards a showroom. If you sell a Saturday purchase, you want the carriageway heading into the city at a weekend. Not the one carrying office traffic out at nine on a Tuesday.
Lit or unlit. A lit site works through the evening commute. In most Indian cities that is the heaviest traffic of the day, and for half the year it runs well past sunset. Ask how it is lit, how many hours it runs, and who pays for the power. An unlit site on a busy road is not a bargain. It is a site that goes dark exactly when the road fills up.
Size, and the distance it is read from. Size is not value on its own. A large panel set back behind a flyover is read by nobody, and a smaller one at eye level beside a queue is read by everybody. What you are buying is legible seconds, not square feet.
How long it has been vacant. This is the lever owners never use. The media owner pays rent on the land, and the licence fee, whether or not anything is mounted. A site blank for two months is a loss running every day. The negotiation on it is nothing like the one on a site with a waiting list. Ask when the last campaign came down.
The month. Rates firm up before Dasara and Deepavali, during a big property launch season, around an election, and whenever a category with deep pockets moves into a city. They soften in the monsoon and in the quiet weeks after a festival. The same site is two different prices in August and October.
The formats are priced on different units
| Format | Sold as | What moves it most |
|---|---|---|
| Hoarding or unipole | One site for a display cycle | Corridor, facing, illumination, vacancy |
| Bus shelter and pole kiosk | A run of units on a route | How many units, and how tightly clustered |
| Gantry and foot overbridge | One structure, longer cycles | Whether traffic queues under it |
| Digital screen (DOOH) | A slot inside a loop | Slot length, loop length, how many advertisers share it |
| Transit: bus, auto, taxi | Per vehicle per month | Route, and whether the vehicle parks where you sell |
| Mall, apartment and office media | Per property per cycle | Footfall, and who else is allowed to advertise there |
One city is worked through site by site on what a hoarding costs in Bengaluru, which is the market we buy in most often.
Two of these are commonly misread. A digital screen looks cheap until you work out the loop: a ten-second slot in a two-minute loop is one appearance in twelve, and the price is for that twelfth. A run of pole kiosks looks expensive until you notice it covers the three kilometres your buyer drives every day. A single big hoarding across town does not.
Buying direct, or through an agency
Owners assume direct is cheaper. Sometimes it is. But the Indian media trade has run for decades on the seller paying a commission to an accredited agency out of the published rate. So the agency's cost and yours are not the same cost, and the card rate is mostly a starting position. A first-time direct buyer frequently pays more than an agency pays for the identical fortnight on the identical panel.
What an agency should be giving you for that is not access. It is judgement. The sites they refused to put on your list, the reason the cheap one was cheap, and the phone call that replaces a torn flex before you notice it. If the list you receive is every site the media owner had available, sorted by price, you are paying for an email forward.
Whichever route you take, one question decides more than the rate. Who holds the licence for that structure? Ask, and ask to see it. In several Indian cities the permission sits with the civic body, in a register that is rewritten from time to time. A site sold to you in good faith can come down in a removal drive, with nothing refunded.
What a quotation must break out before you can compare it
Put every quotation into these lines before you look at the total.
- The site reference, with a dated photograph taken this month from the approaching carriageway, not from the far side of the road
- Which carriageway it faces, and the direction traffic moves past it
- Panel size and the exact artwork size, which are not the same number once the frame is allowed for
- Illumination: whether it is lit, how, and for how many hours
- The display cycle, with the mounting date and the take-down date written as dates
- Printing and mounting, priced separately from the media, and who does it
- Who holds the municipal permission for the structure
- Taxes, stated rather than implied
- Whether mid-cycle photographs are included, and how often
Anything a seller will not put in writing is the thing to worry about. Two quotations with the same total and different answers on this list are not the same purchase.
What is usually left out and arrives later
Printing the flex and mounting it. Artwork built to the panel's safe area, which your existing design will not fit. A reprint if the first one tears in the rains, which in a coastal or a high-wind location is a question of when. Electricity on a lit site, on some contracts. Taxes. And the campaign number or code that makes the whole thing traceable, which costs almost nothing and is left out of nine proposals in ten.
When outdoor is the wrong buy
When you sell to a named list of two hundred companies. A road full of strangers is the wrong room.
When you need to prove which enquiry came from which advertisement. Outdoor cannot do it, and a seller who offers you a footfall number should be asked how it was counted.
When the budget covers one site for two weeks. Outdoor works on repetition, so a short burst on one panel buys a sighting rather than a memory. That money does more in search, or in a cinema screen in your own catchment held for two months.
When the thing you are advertising needs explaining. A driver gives you one line. If the proposition takes a paragraph, put the paragraph on a page and use the road to send people looking for it.
What to do next
Take the site list in front of you. Mark each line with the four things it does not tell you: the facing, the lighting hours, the take-down date, and who holds the permission. Send that back as four questions. The replies sort the sellers faster than any rate comparison will.
If you want the shortlist made by somebody who has stood at the site, book the free audit and bring the list.