
How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money? - midas
https://www.thumbtack.com/blog/how-do-the-yellow-pages-still-make-money/
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protomyth
Because Google does a horrible job when you need a business in a rural area.
It gives businesses hundreds of miles away first. The yellow pages still have
its uses.

Heck, Apple and Siri are worse. Whoever did the location part of maps missed a
lot.

~~~
protomyth
To give a simple example:

"nearest gas station" \- Google gives 3 in the next town over, but skips the
tribally owned one (which is $.05 cheaper) that you pass on the way to the
ones listed.

Siri gives one station 10 miles away that you pass 4 stations to get to.

"nearest grocery store" \- Google gets this one correct listing the two on the
reservation and the closest one in the next town.

Siri skips both on the reservation and directs you to the one in the next
town. You need to drive by one of the two on the reservation to get to it.

Phone book yellow pages has all of them listed.

This is the easy stuff. Asking about oil changes and tires is pretty bad.

// Siri and Weather.app on iOS is actually incapable of finding the town by
zip code or name and give results "Not Found" or more bizarrely a town in New
York state even though it correctly interpreted North Dakota. It also gives
Fargo listings for Jamestown. Google keeps giving the college location I work
at as in a town 40 miles from here.

~~~
protomyth
I have one more to add. I had to drive from New Rockford ND to 4 Bears Casino
in New Town ND on Friday. I know how to get to New Town[1], but have never
gone to the casino[2]. I search Siri for "4 Bears Casino New Town North
Dakota" and get nothing. I then type its address (which I am confirming as I
post) "202 Frontage Rd, New Town, ND 58763" into Maps.app. It then shows a
place in Connecticut (different state and different zip code).

1) do not go through Minot no matter what the GPS says

2) a lot of meetings are held at various tribal casinos since they all have a
lot of conference rooms and are convenient to the hotel that is almost always
built next to the casino.

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jay-saint
After a new controller came into our company we conducted an audit of all
existing expenses. Turns out we were paying $277 a month for multiple full
color Yellow page listings. The owners set these up well before we had a
marketing department and just kept paying for years. We did not even have a
copy of the Yellow pages in our building to see what our ad looked like. We
have since cut this ad to the most basic listing, but are stuck paying the
high rate until the new book is published in February 2016.

My point is that this is how they are still making money, thousands of
business customers that are just used to paying them forever.

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drewg123
I've tried and failed to get my house excluded from their distribution. They
hire a bunch of low wage people to just toss one on the lawn/porch of every
house, and don't seem to pay any attention to the houses that have asked to
not get one.

This irks me because, when I travel on business, having one of these sitting
on my porch is a nice indication that I haven't been home all week, so please
rob me. You can stop your mail, set up light timers, etc, but just try keeping
the yellow pages away.

Sigh,

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jonknee
In a just world that would be considering littering, but somehow they get away
with it.

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imglorp
I've wondered about filing a criminal complaint against them, if I could find
out who is doing the delivery.

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gbhn
The article addresses this: some cities attempted laws against YP deliveries,
but they were thrown out on free speech grounds.

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jonknee
That would be a novel defense of littering... Free speech should not mean you
can throw 1000 pages of ads on my stoop.

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kazinator
Try looking for some business with Google, and then a Yellow Pages search
engine (like the Canadian one: yellowpages.ca).

Dig through reams of spam, irrelevant references, review sites with misleading
info, and non-local results? or scroll through nothing but business names and
links?

No contest.

Just to find the opening hours of some business can be a hassle with a search
engine.

~~~
jbob2000
What's funny about your comment is that yellow pages uses google search and
maps to compile it's results. Why not skip the cruft and go right to the
original source?

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function_seven
I just did two identical searches in google.com and yp.com, and the results I
got on yp were entirely different than those on google, and more numerous.

yp.com has a ton of listings directly submitted to them. They may use Google
as one of many data sources, but they're by no means the original source.

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at-fates-hands
This is one way YP.com is transitioning to more online marketing. They have
started to bundle their yp.com offerings with their print offerings.

If you buy a print ad, you can get a cut on the .com ad and placement
depending on how much you're spending. I also noticed yp.com has the first
8-10 listings are paid ads, which go right below the fold. If you don't scroll
down, you'd never notice the non-paid listings.

It's pretty sketchy to me, but I guess they're doing what they have to in
order to survive

~~~
wilkenm
That's actually the opposite direction of where they're moving. yp.com has
little, if any, relation to the print business.

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debacle
I used to work in agency media and one of the reasons I got out was because
these companies are starting to cannibalize that industry pretty heavily.

They'll put a half-page ad up for $500 a month, but then also cover all of
your digital media (advertising, website, making sure you're on Places and
whatever then Bing equivalent is) for free.

They're nailing down these companies who see the web work as a value add for
the yellow pages ad, when really it's the other way around. The yellow pages
ad is relatively worthless, and they're massively overpaying for their web
presence.

~~~
josephjrobison
Absolutely - one business I work with is essentially paying YP $900 a month to
run a $300 a month AdWords campaign. They throw in a bunch of other "premium
YP listing" but analytics shows no more than 12 referrals from YellowPages.

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TodPunk
This opens up my mind to a lot of possibilities. Some poignant conversation
starters for your local lunch group:

\- What kind of investment returns did the stock of those bankrupted yellow
pages make and at what cycles?

\- What does it really take to kill an old technology?

\- Is there a way to compete with established dying tech companies at their
own game, or is it purely by trying to advance their users to your new tech?

\- What does this say about transitional companies that possibly offer both
the old AND the new techs, like the yellow pages that offer online versions?
Are they going to move forward or are they just delaying their deaths a bit?

\- What kind of talent is needed to sustain these kinds of businesses? It's
going to look very different from the talent that grows new business, but I
can't deny that they're both forms of talent.

Lots of food for thought.

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cthulhujr
They're making big money on their online listings -- particularly from small
business owners who know no better. A product I used to develop was a direct
competitor to them (listings for a niche business market) and the sales team
would tell horror stories of the aggressive sales techniques YP uses. They
would basically bully small business owners (primarily in the older
demographic) into paying exorbitant rates for a templated ("Custom!") web site
with unreal promises of traffic and leads. These charts really seem to support
that target market. It's one thing, if that's what your clients are actually
using to find your business, but it's disgraceful when using your brand
recognition to extort businesses. Reminiscent of the alleged Yelp shenanigans.

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L_U_C_A_S
"Yellow Pages Ltd. is cutting 300 jobs by November in a corporate
“realignment” designed to make the company leaner and free up dollars to
invest in its digital ventures as it continues to move away from print
directories."

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/yellow-
pag...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/yellow-pages-to-
cut-300-jobs-in-corporate-realignment/article26714341/)

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27182818284
I've seen people use the Yellow Pages as a filter before. For example, a
website doesn't take too long to get up these days with templates, but a two-
page color ad in the yellow pages costs thousands of dollars. If you can
afford the Yellow Pages ad, you're also likely insured, etc. I personally do
not use them, and I recycle them when they're delivered.

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zeveb
It makes sense, but I gotta say that I don't even take them into my home
anymore—they go straight into the dumpster.

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ghaff
Not that I use the local YP much, but it probably depends to a large degree on
how often you need local services like plumbers etc. To be sure, even as a
homeowner, you tend to compile your own rolodex (to use an anachronism) of
local service companies to use but every now and then you need something
different that may not be easy to find on the Web. (Web presence is still very
[EDIT] hit or miss for a lot of local companies.)

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gopowerranger
This is true and happened to me just last week. I used to belong to Angie's
List, which helped a lot, but I so rarely used it that I dropped the service.
I wished I kept my Yellow Pages last week when I wanted to look something up.

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PaulKeeble
Specific applications are usually better than their generic competitor. A
gerneric web search might be able to find some of the same information but the
service yell and yellow pages provides is really vastly more effective. I
genuinely couldn't find a stationary shop locally using google and maps this
week a task I completed in 30 seconds on yell.co.uk.

I am not looking forward to the inevitable death because I dont think there is
a viable alternative right now and certainly not one with the quality of data
that makes yell so useful. Local business searches are just awful everywhere
but on yell which is why its still alive.

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ArtDev
Its like what my 7-year-old asked me the other day, "what is a phonebook?"

~~~
gohrt
It's what you sit on when you have dinner with the adults!

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Splines
These days I use Google Maps scoped to my neighbourhood and do a search that
way. Trying to do the same with web search is an exercise in frustration.

The one nice thing about the yellow pages is that it does provide a results
filter, in that you're going to find local businesses willing to pay money to
show up in a book.

Having a filter for "serious, local-only businesses" is a useful thing to
have. IMO online yellow pages doesn't have that. Yelp and the like are sort of
close but their UI and search-locality aren't as tight as they should be to
serve this purpose.

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panglott
Loves getting the yellow pages: it's the best way to get cheap paper for
firing the charcoal grill.

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eddyg
If you want to stop phone books from being delivered (and you're in the U.S.)
start with
[https://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/](https://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/)

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nvk
A lot of sofas need an extra leg.

