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The Death of the Yellow Pages

In these harsh economic times, it is a popular and entertaining pastime to declare the “death” of such-and-such an industry.  Newspapers are a common target and a popular subject — take Walter Isaacson’s recent Time Magazine cover story on “how to save your newspaper.”  With the global popularity of the internet, blogs, and the omnipresent Google, it seems logical that as more and more people turn to online sources for their information, traditional printed resources will fall by the wayside.  But is this necessarily so?  Specifically, what about another once-popular printed resource?  Has Google killed the Yellow Pages?

Blogger Tracy Coenen of WalletPop thinks so (and she’s not alone).  In July of 2008, she wrote a series of articles entitled “Top 25 things vanishing from America” — in at #24 was The Yellow Pages.  In her article, she referenced the results of a study by The Kelsey Group, a Princeton NH-based local advertising research firm, predicting that usage of newspapers and print Yellow Pages would drop by as much as 10% in 2008 — nearly triple the falloff rate of previous years.

In November of 2008, Tracy wrote a follow-up article, “Is it now time to knell the death of the yellow pages?” where she quoted an analyst as predicting that spending on advertising in print and online versions of the Yellow Pages would fall by over 6% in the coming year and that spending in the print-only directories is expected to drop by 39% over the next four years.  The Wall Street Journal published an article that same month entitled “Extinction Threatens Yellow-Pages Publishers” which seems to lend some credence to the theory that the Yellow Pages may soon go the way of the dinosaur.

However, in May of 2008 Reuters printed a press release stating that traffic to YELLOWPAGES.COM (which is owned by AT&T) in 2008 grew by 70.  The Yellow Pages Group’s Fourth Quarter and 2008 Financial Results state that “online revenues for Directories and Vertical Media combined were $69.5 million, representing organic growth of 44.7% over the same period in 2007.”

Along with this growth online, there seems to be an increasing trend towards communities cracking down on excessive and unwanted delivery of printed directories to actual homes and businesses.  A January 2009 law passed in Albany, New York is considered by many to be quite a setback for the Yellow Pages industry, and the movement to force Yellow Pages publishers to make it easier to opt-out of receiving telephone books at all is gaining momentum all across the country.    The Kelsey Group believes that greater restrictions on the delivery of print-only versions of the Yellow Pages are inevitable, and these restrictions are only going to impose further costs and headaches on an industry that is already cutting costs.

With mounting pressure from local communities to reduce their delivery and increased revenue from the online directories, perhaps the future of the Yellow Pages is not in print, but online after all.  As Adam Dewitz of the PrintCEO blog points out in his article “Are the Yellow Pages Still Relevant?” –

“Phone books and other directory products have long been singled out as dying print products. These type of print products can’t compete with Web applications that provide more timely information and can be mashed-up* with other data sources.”

* “mash-up” is a term that refers to a new breed of Web-based applications that combine services from different, and sometimes competing, Web sites to provide a completely new service.  For example, a mash-up might overlay local traffic information with a Google Map to provide an interactive traffic map.

Chris Smith of SearchEngineLand has listed 10 ideas he thinks could save the Yellow Pages.   (At the top of his list, too, is the idea that distributors need to come up with some way to stop delivering books to people who don’t need or want them!)  His list:

1. Come up with some way to stop distributing books to people who no longer use them.
2. Make it clear on your phonebook covers how you’re making up for the environmental impact of the books, if you must continue to blanket-distribute.
3. Get industry usage statistics to be rock-solid and dependable.
4. Step up your public relations game!
5. Add tracking phone numbers to every single YP ad, and let advertisers see the results.
6. Drop the cost of print advertising!
7. Bundle, bundle, bundle!
8. Time to get internet and mobile savvy!
9. Fix your d*** data!
10. Merge yourselves.

And he even offers a “bonus idea” for print: Issue more specialty directories for large markets.

“Specialty-audience directories are much smaller in scope, but they have very dedicated demographic groups that are often more accepting of printed books — they like to show their specialized community support through using the businesses in those targeted directories. Niche markets appear to me to be one area where print can be highly successful still.”

Almost every point in his list is taken from a concept that not only works, but works extremely well — online.  For example, Google Analytics provides an amazing wealth of hard data that is invaluable to advertisers, but as Chris points out in his description of point #3, the Yellow Pages are notoriously bad at providing feedback on how well their advertising actually works.

“[D]on’t just tell me how many “references” to printed books there were, but how many times consumers turned to those books to find a new business, rather than just “references” of times when they were looking up the numbers for businesses they already knew of. And, which company’s print yellow pages were referenced in each area? Don’t just smash all the directory usage figures together into a number that doesn’t let people know which company(ies) from whom a business might want to buy advertising.”

Are the Yellow Pages dead? No, not yet — but the end is near.  Unless the Yellow Pages and the industry as a whole manages to address some fundamental challenges (rising costs, falling revenue, increased competition online from not only search engines like Google but other independent directory services that made the technological leap before they did), they will certainly be extinct before too long.

And if they go, would you miss them?