McDonald's didn't approve those Orange Line ads that got some people upset

I thought the lack of a McDonald's logo was really odd as well.

I have NEVER seen a McDonald's ad withou the arches in it...anywhere.

They do, they have a coop where they vote on all local promotions

is when I see ads that have been clearly left up too long, and the MBTA doesn't bother to turn them over with new advertisers to generate more revenue.

There's currently an ad at Blandford St. on the B line for Borderlands 2, a video game that came out in September 2012. So the company advertising that game probably paid for 4 months' worth of ad space, and got 10.

One of the PR people at my last job announced in a meeting that they were buying MBTA ads specifically because the T never takes them down, so you get twice as much advertising as you paid for. The T needs revenue. They should be working harder to turn over those spaces!

You know what the fares would be without the advertising revenue to offset all the costs not covered by government stipends and the fares themselves?

Actually, I do. Assuming advertising constitutes 100% of the "Other Operating Revenue" as detailed in the FY2013 Statement of Revenue and Expenses, then advertising revenue brought in $47,433,748 in FY2012. Let's divide that by the systemwide number of passengers (defined as one single one-way trip) in FY2012 (that's 400,185,000, according to Joe Pesaturo), and we get a result of ~0.1185, which means an across-the-board fare hike of about 12% (the difference between a $70 monthly pass and a $79 monthly pass, or between a $2 subway fare and a $2.25 fare) would be sufficient to totally replace ad revenues.

Assuming, however, that advertising instead constitutes 100% of the nebulously titled "Other Income" in non-operating revenues (that figure was $50,958,509, for reference), we have to redo our math and discover that the new "ad revenue per rider" number is ~0.1273, or a roughly 13% across-the-board fare hike. Hell, let's add both of those numbers together and assume that the ad revenue is a "massive" $98,392,257 - we still only get a per-rider number of ~0.2458, or a roughly 25% fare hike.

I don't know about you, but I'd happily pay 25% more per trip if it meant expelling all ads from the MBTA system. These numbers also nicely explain why we've seen a hot and heavy rollout of the latest and greatest in advertising technology across the system as of late - seems ad revenue, whatever it's actually being reported as, is on the decline. Better sell more ads to make up for the difference!!

I agree with the previous anon. Instead of plastering an ever-rising number of stupid posters and commercial televisions (a term which here means "televisions that only play commercials") all over the system until we reach Peak Advertisement, we should repurpose the electronics to display useful information only, and ditch the posters.

I do believe that advertising money contributes a rather small portion to the T's operating budget.

In FY 2008 advertising contributed 11.0 million dollars to the MBTA's 1.413 billion dollar budget.