Newsletter Archive - Local Search & IYP
Print Yellow Pages Are Toast
02/18/2010 - At least that was the title of a commentary by one Chris Silver Smith in September, 2007.
"…My gut feeling is that the Google Trends graph for searches for "yellow pages" is likely representative of a broad behavioral pattern of Internet users who are going to traditional Yellow Pages sites less and less. If we project the pattern out in time, we can see that searches for "yellow pages" might reduce down to nil by as soon as 2011…"
Better man the lifeboats, we only have a little under two years left to go.
Or how about more recently silliness: "Google takes aim at the Yellow Pages". With a data point of one advertiser, suddenly for just for just "….$25 a month, small businesses can buy an enhanced listing in test markets at a small-business friendly price. Other companies have offered similar flat-fee ads, but none with the heft of Google."
We all know that since the early days of the Internet, an ongoing line of new Internet based start-ups has their eyes on $29 billion Yellow Pages market. But in reality their efforts have met with limited success at best. Why?
In the same article about how Google is after the Yellow Pages industry, Jennifer Dulski, the chief executive of Center'd, an "online company that helps users finds local businesses online" offered this epiphany:
"Individual local businesses are hard to reach at scale. The only people who have been successful at capturing local businesses have had massive sales forces, like publishers of phone book directories."
No kidding. While small businesses make up the vast majority of U.S. businesses they only account for a very small fraction of online advertising dollars. And while they may be very good at what they do, generally they are not marketing experts, and certainly may not be online advertising experts either.
I was glad to see that Neg Norton of YPA was quoted that about 10% of the industry's $13 billion in revenue comes from the Internet. And as Neg noted, Google is really as much of a partner as well as a potential competitor.
If Google was pressed for details, in their analysis they would acknowledge that Yellow Pages publishers are the best sources so far for helping small businesses with their online marketing on Google (and other sites). Without that content, you really don't have much that you can search for do you.
If you have ever tried to do this stuff yourself you would find Google's AdWords system is difficult to navigate, time consuming, and requires these same busy small businesses to develop bidding strategies, to create ad copy, to monitor listings and even to learn Web analytics programs, all while trying to run a business.
Let's give kudos' to Google for trying to reach these small businesses with a neat, innovative, inexpensive program, but with some 3.5+ million advertisers in the US, even big name Google will have trouble reaching more that maybe one million of them, assuming this new program catches on.
In the interim, while we're getting ready to man the life boats, let's just give the local sales forces a chance to work with those small businesses to implement a multi-platform solution to their business needs.
And then come September of 2011 we can check the toaster to see what really happened.