Do You Believe Yellowpages are Dying? I DO, READ NOW!

I see opportunity here. A new job market is about to be born, and a new market for providing a service....seems intersting.

hi ,
This is good for advertisement .I have been visited your link and find it cool .

Nice find there!

Some of those quotes would make for a great headline promoting your other marketing services like "Bill Gates says...The traditional Yellow Pages are doomed!"

keep in mind that you are also quoting the man who once said:
"“No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

....

and I'm pretty sure that he once was quoted saying the internet was a passing trend...

I go to great lengths to see that my clients never spend another dime in the YP.
When they start putting that YP money into regular direct mail it becomes clear to them rather quickly that they have been wasting thousands of precious dollars a year.

If you are telling your clients to buy space in the YP you are wasting their limited resources on absolute garbage. YOU will make a bigger profit if you use direct mail.

If you don't know what your doing in that arena then you get ahold of me for help.
I've built and measured over a thousand mailings. I am on over 400 mailing lists and receive and observe several thousand pieces a year.

My door is open.

...personally I think that the yellow directories won't die completely ...they may mutate in some way....become thinner....and far less expensive.

with Qr Codes becoming more popular and giving them the ability to take offline print media online I am surprised they have not implemented it to give them more clout.

Q

Most business owners I have talked to are even more sick of the YP than your everyday consumer and many are well aware of the horror stories and often have some ROI insights of their own to add....so that should tell you something right there.

Certain industries still seem to do alright in terms of ROI though in certain areas, especially HVAC and plumbing. We've also established in past discussions on this topic that people in metro areas or close to metro areas are likely to never use the YP anymore versus someone out in the country or in small towns. The "age-usage" gap will lessen over the next decade too as more older folks get accustomed to local internet search. Heck, ipads are the new rage in my Grandma's church group.

- Jim

Sure, The Yellow Pages Are Dead
The best part of yellow pages advertising is the extraordinary incompetence of most folks advertising there.

Yellow pages is "out of fashion" and tool costly.Welcome to the new online world

A slightly different take on why YP can be hazardous to a business. I used to be a mortgage broker here in the UK. For those that don't know the mortgage market began a downturn in August 2007 that lasts till this day. My income dropped by 90% over an 18 month period until I finally left the industry and began full time IM. They were hard times.

In February 2008 I attended a course about getting into the debt consolidation/ sale and leaseback market. There were about 20 brokers there, all desperately looking to replace lost income.

One of them told us his story. He had been very successful using Yellow Pages, to the extent that he advertised sub prime mortgages in a number of areas. He was spending £60,000 per year (that's around $90,000 or $120,000 at the exchange rates back then) but pulling in £180,000 of business = happy days.

Having just committed to a 12 month contract, the market turned and sub prime mortgages became almost impossible to place. So he's left with a £60k advertising overhead and no income. Not sure what happened to him. I'd be very surprised if he escaped bankruptcy.

Obviously hindsight is a wonderful thing, but he didn't have a website. If he had, and had spent even half of his budget on seo/ppc he would at least have been able to swiftly change direction and solicit business that he could place. Instead he was left advertising to a high demand market that banks wouldn't lend to.

The moral of the story isn't that YP is bad or that websites are good, it's that markets can turn quickly, taking businesses down with them. So don't encourage a business to put all their advertising eggs in one basket.

Tony

I don't think you'll start a fight here, pretty much everyone already knows that YP is on the way out, and it's just a matter of time before it gets killed off or just becomes irrelevant, just like print newspapers.

There are still some offline business owners who don't seem to realize this, and now is the time for offline consultants to go after them with a vengeance! The next year is going to be very fruitful indeed for people like us, and we should take advantage of every chance we get while it's bursting with opportunity.

Paul

WE have had a really bad experience with yellow pages and do not use them any more.

I think the main challenge is to convince your local business owners who have been advertising there for years that it's on it's last legs.

These guys seem to be staunchly devoted to their YP adverts and think it's the only way to advertise their business.

If the yellow pages are ever dead, that means the offline market is saturated. Everyone has websites and web guys... nobody is using print ads... no one left to sell to...

Long live the yellow pages.