Whatever happened to pricing advertising space at "what the market will bear"? If half the advertising space is empty, the TTC should cut ad prices until they fill all their spaces again. Reduce by 50% if need be. Or more if need be.
Aside from printing costs (let's assume those are separated), the only expense to the TTC is hiring someone to rotate/replace posters now and then. The space where a poster could be, is still there, whether it's holding a poster or not.
Perhaps an economics major can explain this to me.
What's happened to transit advertising is the same thing that has happened to billboards and periodical advertising (in newspapers and magazines): over the last 20 years, marketers have shifted to online channels which offer much more targeted ads that are more effective at motivating action. In Canada, about 2/3rds of all ad spending goes into online advertising of one sort or another.
Ads on transit vehicles are at an especial disadvantage here, since that poster will be travelling all over the city more or less at random, and as the buyer, you have have no efficient way of reinforcing your messaging short of plastering the whole system with your ads. (Whereas, if you buy a poster in a subway station, you're targeting a specific geographic area, and most passengers are gonna walk by the exact same ad twice a day for the length of your campaign.)
Transit advertising has also taken an especial hit off the back of the pandemic. Fewer passengers means fewer eyeballs, which means lower rates and fewer buyers.
As for fixing this problem by lowering ad rates, I'm not sure that'll work: the businesses you would attract by making transit ads cheaper are often going to be the small, local businesses that are least interested in advertising in the terms I've described. If I run a dental office at Yonge and Sheppard, given the choice between having a single poster at platform level at Sheppard-Yonge Station, and having 20 posters on random subway trains, I would much rather have the platform poster. Even if the 20 subway posters work out much, much cheaper.
: Use that empty space for information that would actually be useful to the transit riders. Such as the map of the network, with updates for all long-term detours. Or rules for what is or is not allowed on TTC vehicles (bicycles, e-scooters, ...). Or information about schedules on major lines. Or locations of TTC self-service bike repair stands.
