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Every medium sells you an audience. Ask how it was counted.

Newspapers, billboards and online video, priced from their own rate cards and measured by their own industry's rules. Then a car that drives where people are.

What the same budget buys

Each in its own unit, because they are not the same thing. Prices exclude VAT.

Newspaper

An ad 3 columns by 24 cm, in one Sunday Times.

Seen by: 46 403 copies sold³. Card rate R1 394 per column-cm¹.

Billboard

One 12 by 4 m board for 1 to 4 months, printing included.

Seen by: a modelled audience, not a count⁶. Broker's range⁵.

Online video

200 000 to 556 000 video impressions on South African news sites.

Of every 100 video ads on the open web, 17 are ever heard¹². Rates¹⁶¹⁷.

Salience

8 cars for a month in Cape Town city centre, both sides wrapped.

Seen by: about 1,9 million estimated views, range 729 000 to 5 million. Draft prices.

Newspaper

46 403

copies of the Sunday Times sold per issue in the second quarter of 2026³. In 2015 it was 338 532⁴.

What it costs: R1 394 per column centimetre in full colour¹. A full page is R677 484 at card rate, about R14,60 for every copy sold.
How it's counted: ABC audits copies sold². Nobody counts who turned to your page.
Where it's going: Paid weekend newspapers sold 14,5% fewer copies than a year before².

To scale: a Sunday Times page, 9 columns by 54 cm¹. In blue, what about R100 000 buys: 3 columns by 23,9 cm, for one Sunday.

Billboard

0,34 s

the average glance at a standard billboard, from eye tracking of 55 drivers in the United States⁷. Their whole look at one board came to 0,7 to 1,4 s.

What it costs: Owners don't publish prices. A broker quotes R20 000 to R45 000 a month for a 12 by 4 m board on a main road, plus R3 000 to R15 000 to print it⁵.
How it's counted: South Africa's outdoor currency, ROAD, is a model. Ipsos estimates who passed each board from a travel survey of 71 019 people, weighted to 28 million urban adults, then applies a visibility adjustment from UK eye tracking⁶.
Where the eyes are: On the road. Drivers in the study kept 73 to 85% of their visual attention on the road ahead⁷.

6,8 sin view if it can be read from 150 m, at

Drawn to scale, with a person 1,8 m tall. The timer assumes the board can be read from 150 m away; it is our illustration, not a measurement.

Online video

2 s

is all a video ad needs to count as viewable: half of it on screen for two seconds⁸. On YouTube a viewer can skip it after 5⁹.

What it costs: R180 to R500 per thousand impressions on South African news sites¹⁶¹⁷. One sells viewability targeting for R56 more per thousand¹⁷.
Who hears it: On the open web, 17% of video ads were ever heard, and 11% were heard and in view when they finished¹².
Who blocks it: 35,6% of South African internet users block ads at least some of the time, against 29,5% worldwide¹⁵.
Where the money goes: In 2023, 36 cents of each programmatic advertising dollar reached real people on real sites. By early 2026 it was 43,3 cents¹³¹⁴.
How it's counted: YouTube's public view count starts the moment an ad starts to play¹⁰.

Your ad

Skip in 5

2 s counted as viewed
5 s skip appears
6 s gone

A skippable ad, as the rules count it.

A wrapped car

182 h

on the road in a month, per car, in our simulated fleet. Your brand is out all day, where people are.

What it costs: R4 700 to R6 300 per car a month, depending on the area, plus a one-off wrap from R4 500. These are draft prices until we confirm them.
What you get: One car, one month in Cape Town city centre: about 238 000 estimated views, between 91 000 and 622 000.
How it's counted: From each car's GPS track and population data, hour by hour. We don't count who looked; nobody can from a car. We estimate who was near enough to see it, and show you the range.
The flat number: The 30 000 to 70 000 impressions a day often quoted for wraps comes from a 2003 venture-capital white paper. It counted people in passing traffic on US roads, not people who looked¹⁸.

Plan your campaign →Open a sample report

The car passes; the people near enough to see it are counted.

Side by side

Question	Newspaper	Billboard	Online video	Wrapped car
Typical cost	R1 394 per column-cm, Sunday Times¹	R20 000 to R45 000 a month, plus printing⁵	R180 to R500 per thousand impressions¹⁶¹⁷	R4 700 to R6 300 per car a month, draft
How long it runs	One edition	Month by month	Seconds	All month, about 182 hours a car
What counts as seen	A copy sold	A modelled, visibility-adjusted contact	Half on screen for 2 seconds	Near enough to see it, by the hour, as a range
Who counts it	ABC	The OMC's ROAD model	The platform and verification companies	Us, from GPS and population data, with a sample report you can open
Choosing where	By edition	One site	By targeting	12 areas, by where people are

Sources

Arena Holdings, Sunday Times rate sheet 2026, October 2026.
ABC South Africa, Quarter 2 2026 release, 20 August 2026.
Bizcommunity, ABC Q2 2026: newspaper circulation trends downwards, 20 August 2026. Reports ABC data.
Bizcommunity, ABC figures for the third quarter of 2015, 13 November 2015. Reports ABC data. ABC later took about 12 500 misclassified copies off.
Leo Five Media, South African billboard advertising rates, 2026. A broker’s indicative range. Media owners do not publish prices.
Out of Home Measurement Council, OOH audience research methodology, release 2024.4, October 2025.
US Federal Highway Administration, Digital billboards and driver visual behaviour, FHWA-HEP-16-036, 2012. Eye tracking, 55 drivers in two US cities.
Media Rating Council, Viewable ad impression measurement guidelines, version 2.0, 2015.
Google Ads Help, About video ad formats, read 7 November 2026.
Google Ads Help, About YouTube’s cost-per-view bidding, read 7 November 2026.
Integral Ad Science, Media Quality Report, 21st edition, July 2026.
DoubleVerify, Quality and attention benchmarks, Q1 2026, May 2026. Global, open web, excludes connected TV.
ANA, Programmatic media supply chain transparency study, December 2023. US advertisers.
ANA, Programmatic benchmark, Q1 2026, 27 May 2026. US advertisers.
DataReportal and GWI, Digital 2026: South Africa, GWI data, Q2 2025.
Media24, Digital rate card, 1 September 2026.
Arena Holdings, Digital rate sheet 2026, October 2026.
ARD Ventures, Measuring the value of vehicle wraps (white paper), 2003. Internet Archive copy.

Read on 7 November 2026. Rand prices exclude VAT. Our own figures come from the same estimator as the planner, scaled from a simulated fleet until our first cars run.