Billboards come in a variety of shapes and types. Those shapes and types have a great deal of impact on the revenues produced for the billboard owner, and to billboards landlords savvy in their site lease negotiations.
Below are two types of billboards. The facing billboard is affixed to the roof of the building, placing both live and dead loads on the building (think about roof leaks!). The other billboard is mounted on a pair of steel I-beams set into a foundation and resting up against the wall of the building (think about adjacent wall stresses).
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The billboards above are both a type of Static Billboard. That means that each of the billboards only display one advert, and to change the advert requires that the billboard company comes out and change the vinyl cover affixed to the billboard that contains the actual advertising content.
Another very popular (and much more profitable) type of billboard is the Digital Billboard.
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Digital billboards display multiple ads on a large computer-controlled light emitting diode (LED) screen, one at a time, in something like a flip-card configuration. Some of the values of a digital billboard include the ‘live’ nature of the ad, the brightness of the add, and the ability to quickly deploy new and updated ads by remotely reprogramming the billboard display screen.
Not big enough for you?
How about a class of digital billboards called “Giants”. There’s one in Downtown Los Angeles at the building known as The Reef:
This Giant is weights in at over 40,000 square feet of screen space. It has three separate sign faces, each one measuring 55 feet high and 736 feet wide! Yeah, it’s a Giant.