Patrick Quinn, one of DOOH.com’s close friends and a former journalist who took his sleuthing capabilities to statistics, gets anonymous reporting from just over 200 DOOH networks (or DPN as he labels them, Digital Place-Based Networks) in North America for his forecast econometrics reports. In his recent talk at the CETW show last week in New York, he outlined how the concentration of networks is still extremely spread, very few are making more than $1 million in yearly revenue. A few bigger guys in a nice position at the top are raking in money, but for the most part, ad-supported networks are either moving along slowly or slowly closing their doors, as the shake out period comes to fruition.

We here at DOOH.com have a list of networks that we use to reference should something come our way and we can pass along an advertiser or two, but recently I started to go down the list and try to contact some of these networks, only to find that many of them did not respond or the numbers were disconnected. Since phone numbers these days are basically free, having a disconnected number is saying a lot. But then again, when you look at the different level of operations between a guy with three screens at his family’s restaurant loading video from thumb drives vs. RMG with their world-class business and slick CEO, all of a sudden the definition of “network” starts to blur, and we realize that a lot of people tried to build little networks all across the country that just never quite made it.

From a higher position, this appears to be the time when some of the larger players sweep in and buy up real estate and technology, bring in better management teams and streamline a bunch of different networks for a bargain price and achieve the scale necessary to be brought into serious advertising discussions. However, just grabbing up as many screens as possible has not proven completely effective in making your network attractive to advertisers.

Bottom line, we are not sure how many networks are out there, as many operate in stealth modes and others emerge to much fanfare only to collapse after lacking sales for a year. Even lower bottom line, there needs to be more cross talk between networks that are out there, navigating a sea with a blindfold unable to see the other boats will surely lead a sailor to his doom. The same goes with DOOH, if you don’t know who your competition is, you can’t be prepared for them, and if you don’t know who is doing what you do better, you can’t learn. Let’s get everyone out of their shells to figure out who is doing things right, and who needs help to get there.