Let your fingers do the walking……..all the way to your keyboard
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Good Old Yellow Pages - no longer a doorstop

As a barometer of advertising’s move from traditional offline media to online directories and search engines, the rapidly shrinking spine-width of the Yellow Pages is a good marker.  A few years ago the Bristol edition was about the size of a concrete block and weighed about as much. But local online search has made huge in-roads into the world of telephone business directories.  The days of the rather charming  JR Hartley wandering in and out of antiquarian bookshops trying to find a copy of his out of print book on fly-fishing are long gone.

In just five years the Bristol edition has lost a staggering eight hundred pages of paid advertising. Perhaps this helps explain why Yellow Pages is nursing a debt mountain of £3.8 billion. While Yell is moving their business online, it cannot keep up with Google and is now selling its adwords instead. It is hard to work out what their business model is going to be in a few years time.  The American comedian Jay Leno said ‘Yellow Pages are for those people who don’t have the Internet’ which is a bit hard, but I can’t remember the last time I used them to find a local supplier.

American research shows that 93% of consumers use the Internet to find a local supplier and check testimonials, compare prices, download a map, view products and compare similar services before making a purchasing decision. Five things you cannot do with a paper directory.

I agree with Claudia Gluzman’s blog in that the public is rapidly turning to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin to build relationships with suppliers. Social media can help a business improve their search engine ranking and many people would now argue that social media marketing is the new Yellow Pages.