Who's Cashing In?
September 21, 2025
Every time you walk through a city, wait for a bus, or glance up from the petrol pump, you are participating in a global market that will generate over $46 billion this year. You provide the essential raw material that fuels this industry, yet you will never see a penny of the profit.
The product is your attention. And it’s being sold without your consent.
The Multi-Billion Dollar Marketplace for Your Eyes
The industry that sells advertising in public spaces is called “Out-of-Home” (OOH) advertising. It’s the business of placing ads anywhere and everywhere outside of your home. This includes everything from classic roadside billboards and ads in bus shelters to the silent, looping screens inside an elevator.
This is no niche market. It’s a massive, global enterprise.
- The Global Market: In 2024, global Out-of-Home advertising revenue is expected to reach $46 billion, a 10% increase from the previous year. It’s projected to grow to $49 billion in 2025. [^1]
- The Growth Engine: The most aggressive and fastest-growing part of this market is Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH). These are the unmissable digital screens that have invaded our public spaces. The global DOOH market alone was valued at over $24 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a rate of over 13% per year. [^2]
This growth is driven by technology that makes these ads more effective at their one true goal: capturing your involuntary attention. [^3] [^4]
The Transaction You Never Agreed To
Let’s be clear about how this multi-billion dollar industry is different from almost any other. It operates on a fundamental premise that is deeply unsettling: your consent is irrelevant.
This is the key point that separates the billboard on the highway from the ad in your social media feed.
When you use a “free” online service, you enter into a bargain. It is often a lopsided and murky deal, buried in pages of terms and conditions you’ll never read, but it is a bargain nonetheless. You trade your attention and your data for the use of the service. You can, at least in theory, log off, delete your account, and walk away from the deal.
The Out-of-Home industry operates on a completely different model: the captive audience.
You cannot opt-out of a billboard. You cannot install an ad-blocker for the city square. You have not given your permission for your mental space to be commandeered for commercial gain. There is no bargain, no exchange of value, and no way to withdraw your consent.
The flow of money is simple. A company pays an advertising firm to place its message in your path. The owner of the physical or digital ad space collects that money. The raw material—your glance, your focus, your finite and precious attention—is taken from you for free.
What Is Your Stolen Attention Worth?
It’s impossible to put a price on a single, stolen glance. But we can look at the aggregate value to understand what’s being taken.
If we take the projected global OOH revenue for 2025—$49 billion—and divide it by the estimated 5.5 billion adults in the world, it comes out to a value of nearly $9 per person, per year.
This isn’t to say you should expect a check in the mail. The point of this calculation is to illustrate a principle: your attention, when gathered and sold en masse, is an incredibly valuable global asset. It is an asset that is currently being mined, packaged, and sold with zero compensation or benefit to the public from whom it is harvested.
It’s Not Just Noise, It’s an Invoice
So the next time you find your eyes drawn to a flashing ad in a public space, don’t see it as just visual clutter. See it for what it is: a tiny piece of a multi-billion dollar transaction that you funded with your focus.
It’s an invoice for a product you never agreed to sell.
The numbers don’t lie. They show a mature and rapidly growing industry built on the non-consensual appropriation of a shared public resource: our collective attention. And they beg a simple question: If our attention is so valuable, why are we letting them have it for free?
References
- [^1] https://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2025/06/out-of-home-global-ad-revenue-to-hit-49bn-in-2025-woo-president-tom-goddard/
- [^2] https://straitsresearch.com/report/digital-out-of-home-advertising-market
- [^3] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/digital-out-of-home-advertising-market-report
- [^4] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-digital-out-of-home-advertising-market