Video ads will flood subways
You’ll see more ads on your commute, thanks to thousands of new digital screens coming to subway cars and stations.
Over the next five years, about 37,000 new video screens will be installed in subway and commuter rail cars. The screens are getting a test run on the No. 7 line, ahead of a full roll out that’ll begin this October.
Another 16,000 new video screens will go into subway and commuter rail stations.
“We have in effect lots and lots of New Yorkers whose eyeballs we can sell to advertisers,” MTA construction chief Janno Lieber said Monday at an MTA board meeting. “That is going to increase our value over time.”
Lieber said the program adds up to the world’s largest out-of-home digital media program.
Already, 1,200 screens have been installed in subway and commuter rail stations after initial tests on the L line’s Metropolitan Ave. Lorimer St. station.
Fifty subway stations got the screens last year, and 100 more will get them this year. Fifteen Long Island Rail Road stops have new digital screens, and they’re also being installed in several Metro-North stations, including in White Plains.
The screens will give the cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority a revenue jolt.
The agency was guaranteed $115 million last year from digital ads and expects to get $117 million this year in its deal with Outfront, the company that will install and run the screens under a 10year contract.
The MTA will make more money from the ad revenue after Outfront recoups its expenses in installing the screens.
The MTA will control about 20% of the material on the screens. It will use the screens to give riders up-todate service status reports, train arrival times and maps.
For the first time, digital screens will switch between daytime and nighttime subway maps. Soon, the screens will have station-specific information.
Tunnel walls are one area where riders waiting for a train will likely be spared an advertising onslaught.
“To put it on the track-wall side would be far more invasive from a service disruption standpoint than to put it on the platform where the customers are standing,” NYC Transit subways chief Sally Librera said.
An MTA board member suggested that NYC Transit President Andy Byford take a page from the London Underground and put digital ads along escalators.
Byford, who worked on the London system, said he’d take the idea under consideration.