Research · Facing the roadside
Your billboard, from the back seat.
A board's angle to the road decides how often the passenger in the back seat faces it. Our ride-hail and taxi cars passed 24,049 billboard faces 15.7 million times in 60 days, and every second of every pass is on record.
1 One second
A second counts when the head is turned as far as the board.
Every second of a pass puts the board at an angle off the direction of travel, and the board can be read or it can't. A bulletin face reads to 300 m head-on and up to 60° off its face, with no building in the way.
A camera on the back of the front seat reads how far the passenger's head is turned from the screen in front of them. It can't tell left from right, so each second also carries the measured odds that the turn went the board's way.
When the head is turned at least as far as the board's angle, the second counts as facing. Turn the head yourself.
2 One pass
Thirty seconds past a bulletin.
A car at city speed passes a bulletin 40 m off the road. The passenger's head sits at 23.6°, the fleet's average. The board is faced while it sits inside that angle, and each faced second is weighted by the 50% odds that the turn went its way. Once the board slides past 23.6°, it stays readable and stops being faced.
Drawn to the method. The reading distance, the angle limit, the head angle and the odds are the measured values; the road, the speed and where the face stands are the drawing's.
3 Every pass, by angle
Draw how often you think the board is faced.
One bar per angle off the road, as a share of the seconds the board can be read.
A board within 15° of straight ahead is faced in 22% of the seconds it can be read. At 15 to 35° it's 13%, at 35 to 60° 4.7%, and past 60° 0.46% or less.
The head holds its angle whatever the board does: between 23.3° and 23.9° on average at every bearing. The boards that stand where heads already point collect the facing, so a face's angle to the traffic decides most of what it earns.
4 Every format
Which format do passengers face most?
Against the fleet at 100, urban panels index at 143, bus shelters at 128, billboards at 98 and fueling-station screens at 28. Every market and format, with its counts, is in the Attention Index.
5 Why it holds up
Four ways the number is checked.
- Where the car was
- The matched path puts a car within 4.5 m of a GPS fix it was never shown, at the median. A straight line between fixes misses by 86 m.
- What counts as a turn
- At a 14° threshold, the camera registers a turned head as often as a separate eye reading sees the eyes leave the screen: a ratio of 0.96.
- Attention shows up
- Windows a vision model labels attentive carry turned heads 0.75 times as often as windows it labels ignoring. Move the same labels ten minutes off their windows and the ratio reads 0.98.
- Nothing leaks in
- Shift every pass's camera windows ten minutes away and heads turned toward the board do not rise: real minus shifted is −0.68 points.
40% of passes overlap a camera window and 19% carry a head reading. An empty cab has no passenger to read.
Every figure on this page is read from published claims version 6, measured September 26, 2026, each with its window, its query and the method version it was built on (pass audience v6). Facing is measured on the head camera, over seconds the board could be read. The Attention Index · How we measure