Search sticks two fingers up at Yellow Pages

Maybe Yellow Pages was ahead of its time with the slogan 'let your fingers do the walking'. It is certainly more appropriate today as a slogan for Google or Yahoo if you consider that anyone searching for information, businesses or research uses their fingers to type in their query.

I remember a conversation that I had with a Yellow Paged rep in the wooden chalet building I used as an office. I listened, irritated, at the rehearsed sales pitch and strikingly crisp suit on the rep who sat opposite me.

I really chuckle now at how the salesman tried to sell me a colour ad or a two colour ad because it stood out from the rest.

Yellow Pages were just introducing laptops to replace the heavy presentation folders and several copies of Yellow Pages that had to be lugged around in a square doctors leather case.

I remember commenting how (even back then) the Internet would replace Yellow Pages and I also remember the reply from the guy who disagreed with me.

I suppose he had to, he was being paid to sell advertising and he was probably paid to say what he said. Only idiots like Gerald Ratner would call their products 'crap' in front of clients (or the worlds media in Ratner's case).

I am surprised it has taken so long for Yell to let leg go of their precious domain and capitulate to the net. It has been a spirited effort for sure but evidence (or is that proof) is now emerging that suggests the tipping point has now been reached and the search engine has surged into a convincing lead.

A blog post on Web Pro News illustrates in a graph how Yellow pages and traditional print has dropped off from owning 33% of the advertising market in 2007 to thirty percent in 2008. In contrast, search has risen from thirty percent to thirty one percent.

Yellow pages online comes in a poor third at nineteen percent (17% 2007); although I expect Yellow Pages Internet to continue to rise against the paper version in coming years.

You have to have a certain sympathy for YP (don't you?) because they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't. Can you imagine telling all of their paper advertisers five years ago that the book was dead and the Internet was king after spending so much time and effort on marketing paper for all those years?

Now the argument is not worth arguing and at some stage, the whole paper version will surely fold (think of the amount of trees that will be saved).

Have a read of my post from a year ago today: Paper versus Megabytes the future of printing over pixels, what is your take?

Why Yellow Pages it dead.

Who still uses Yellow Pages?