Local marketing industry savants have long been predicting the demise of print Yellow Pages books, going the way of the buggy whip due to overwhelming competition from Internet alternatives. Further, the aggressive invasion of search engines into the local space during the past few years has inspired some analysts to wonder if Internet Yellow Pages directories might also be headed for extinction along with the printed books. Readily available stats from Google show trends and provide a good sense of what’s actually going on across the local space on the Internet. Ironically, we can also use these stats to predict the demise of traditional Yellow Pages sites. Click here for the full story
But another report says:
Classified Intelligence (CI) said in its latest client report that the shift to the Internet for information represents, perhaps, an end to the era of big printed books filled with everyone from auto mechanics to zydeco sellers. People have opted for the desktop and the mobile device; the advertisers who make yellow pages directories profitable have not missed this.
CI senior analyst Joe Michaud said the yellow pages model of once-a-year buys to keep pace with competitors left it vulnerable to innovators who could nimbly serve customers in a more favorable way. Michaud likened the situation to newspapers, watching helplessly as readers departed while online classifieds sites pulled in the ads people would have once paid the paper to run. Click for the full story.
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