VELO4U.
Every impressions estimate we show an advertiser, explained end to end: the record, the maths, and the assumptions. Nothing up our sleeve.
Press → to begin · about 3 minutes
The measurement problem
Fixed outdoor is properly measured. Australia's MOVE system publishes audited audience numbers for billboards, street furniture and transit. A wrapped private car has no fixed site and no traffic count, so most of the wrap industry simply asserts a number.
We took the other road: record everything, model as little as possible, and publish the working. This page is that working.
The number we refuse to use
The 30–70k range traces back to early-2000s US fleet-graphics marketing: full-time commercial trucks on big-city arterials, with no audited public methodology behind it. It has been repeated for twenty years because it sells wraps. We use it only as a comparison, never as a claim.
Every factor in the model you're about to see is chosen to under-claim.
What we count
One OTS = one person physically positioned to see the car: passing traffic, oncoming traffic, pedestrians. It is the same unit the rest of the outdoor industry prices in.
Confirmed looks, attention scores, or audited audiences. Wrapped private cars sit outside MOVE's measured universe, so nobody in this category has audited numbers, and we say so out loud.
“Estimated Opportunities-To-See (OTS), aligned with Australian OOH methodology. Conservative estimate; not audited MOVE data.” It ships inside every report.
Step 1 · The record
30 s / 50 m
A GPS fix on whichever comes first, the whole time a campaign car drives.
≈ 16 h
On-device offline buffer, so points queue through dead spots and upload late rather than vanish.
Append-only
One record per fix, keyed by its timestamp. History is never edited after the fact.
3 photos / wk
Front and both sides, reviewed by us. No photos, no driver pay, so the wrap is provably on the car.
Kilometres, suburbs and the heat map are all read straight off this record. The only modelled step in our numbers is people-per-kilometre, and the next four slides show exactly how it works.
Step 2 · The model
OTS = kilometres × cars per km × time of day × 1.2 people per car × viewshed
+ a small parked allowance of 25 OTS an hour, tightly capped, only while the GPS explicitly reports the car stationary in view.
Applied to every GPS segment of every campaign car, in Melbourne local time. The assumptions (every rate, the occupancy factor, the time curve) are stored inside each report, so any number we have ever shown you can be reconstructed later.
Factor 1 · Road type
Freeway ≥ 80 km/h
92 OTS / km
Arterial 40–80 km/h
34.5 OTS / km
Local street < 40 km/h
6.9 OTS / km
The band is picked live from GPS speed. These are counts of cars, not of views: they come straight from the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning's Annual Average Daily Traffic Volume data, 9,959 Melbourne road segments, converted to vehicles met per kilometre driven. The view count comes later, after the viewshed.
Factors 2 & 3 · When, and how many
A kilometre's weight across the day
× 1.2
people per passing vehicle
Cars carry passengers, so exposure is counted in people, not vehicles. Melbourne's journey-to-work occupancy is 1.09 (VISTA); mixed-purpose travel sits a little above it.
The fine print, built in
Kerbside exposure earns 60 OTS an hour only while the GPS explicitly reports the car stationary, capped at 15 minutes per ping, so an overnight driveway earns roughly nothing. Always reported as its own line, never hidden in the headline.
Any segment implying more than 200 km/h between fixes is a bad GPS read, not driving, so its distance and OTS are discarded before they can inflate anything.
Distance is summed in straight lines between 30-second fixes, which can only under-count a winding route. Where the maths has to be wrong, it is wrong in your favour.
The maths, on a real day
Day total: 512 moving + 11 parked, reported separately
523
Every report also shows what was discounted: 1,479 people went past the car that day, and 512 of them are counted. The gap is the viewshed, the people who passed but were never in a position to see a door-sized panel. Numbers follow the engine's exact arithmetic; only the rounding is cosmetic.
The homepage number
240 km
the ABS-average passenger car's week (12,400 km a year in Victoria, Survey of Motor Vehicle Use)
× 14
our flat opportunities-to-see per kilometre, after the viewshed discount
= 3,360
estimated OTS per car, per week, about 480 a day
Why 14? With occupancy and viewshed folded in, the engine's ordinary daytime rates work out to 4.6/km on local streets and 16.6/km on arterials, so a flat 14 previews the arterial-heavy suburban driving a real campaign produces without the peak-hour bonuses. One method, two zoom levels.
The heat map
Your report's map divides Melbourne into ≈110-metre cells. A cell's heat is the count of 30-second GPS fixes inside it, so slow, repeated, lived-in streets glow: school runs, shopping strips, the daily commute. A freeway blur passed once stays faint.
Private by construction. Advertisers see aggregated cells, totals and suburbs, never a driver's identity, home address or door-to-door route. That's a term of service, not a favour.
Every seven days
In your weekly report
The guardrails
The stance
If our maths turns out too conservative, you'll see it in your weekly report, and being pleasantly surprised beats being sold a fantasy.
Questions about the methodology: support@velo4u.com