How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?(thumbtack.com) |
How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?(thumbtack.com) |
Heck, Apple and Siri are worse. Whoever did the location part of maps missed a lot.
"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.
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.
I'd understand it if most of the local businesses that forgo an online presence were all 1-4 person, family operations where they're all too old to have a "Google it first" mindset. However the majority of businesses that refuse to register themselves with Google have no excuse. I can search for the closest laundromat, tire shop, florist, etc directly by name and address and the only results will be those sites that scrape the secretary of state's corporate filings.
Google has made the process of creating an online presence the simplest, most painless process imaginable. Google's My Business service gets you on Maps with all the important info (location, hours, services, etc) for free, yet so few businesses take the importance of being a top, location based result. If a business doesn't come up in my location based search it's as good as if it never existed.
My point is that this is how they are still making money, thousands of business customers that are just used to paying them forever.
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,
Nobody in our building wants them, they go straight in our recycle bin. We have tried many times to get off of their list. I would love to know how to report them for littering or something. I hate these companies!
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.
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.
This horribly hilarious animation[1] of Yellow Pages sales reps is fairly accurate IMHO.
The frustrating part is they were able to drive volume for national businesses with local presence. The sneaky part is that they were fairly incestuous with other IYP's (Internet Yellow Pages sites...ie. directory sites) like SuperPages, etc. which we also used, but that traffic was obfuscated to make it look like it was YP.com driving it.
- 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.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/yellow-pag...
Question: "Sir, how do you use catalogs and the yellow pages?"
Answer: "Home heating, please sign me up for more."
He laughed his ass off, "Seriously?"
To which I replied, "No Joke, why not?"
The conversation moved on from there, and we did discuss how and if people even care about these things, and he indicated many elderly people absolutely did. Turns out, he was door to door in my neighborhood due to a fairly concentrated set of these people who do buy and follow up on direct mail, catalog and use yellow pages regularly.
I suspect YP is going to face a generational fall off of business over the next 10 years as their prime demographics age out.
In addition to YP, there is the whole "direct response" type of campaign, most often executed via the mail, used heavy by televangelists, and others who would be associated with late night TV infomercials. The sweet spot demographic is over 50 for all of this, and as people age out, there just won't be the kind of back fill we saw through the 80's and 90's.
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.
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.
Ironically, the 4th link on the page was a link to that business on yellowpages.ca -- so they did have a listing but I couldn't find it by seaching there.
Google is the one tool to do everything and it does things more than well enough that sites like yellowpages.ca are pretty irrelevant.
...but even with that, I'm still not going to yellopages.com. I'll just search for it and get it directly from their website.
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.
> Why not skip the cruft and go right to the original source?
That depends on whether the compiling that you're skipping provides value. Why skip the gas station cruft and refine your own crude oil to make gasoline? Hey, no road tax!
On the anecdotal evidence side there are 3 laundromats within about 2 min walk from my house, 2 are on a high street and can be found in Google, one is a part of a chain but the other is owned by a Persian guy who's way into his 60's (which still owns a flip phone, and i don't think he knows how to register with Google), 1 is in a mews (like an alley for you yanks) and it's not listed, the coffee shop in the same mews isn't listed either even tho every coffee shop on the high street is. If you open streetview you can walk through the high street but you can't get into the mews.
Ah, but not all businesses have a website though. Of those that do, not all have a website that is ranked on the first page of a Google result.
Ahead of the real thing are spam pages with junk info, many of which are deliberately designed to look as if they might be the official website.
Phonebooks don't seem to burn very well in a fireplace without careful tending; oxygen doesn't get between the pages well enough.
What I would often do is over extend the binding and tear the book. If you take a minute or two and over flex the binding, you can get it to stand up with the pages spread out. Put other bits around the book, and the whole thing burns fairly well. Sure, some poking about might be needed well into the burn, but it's not all that much.
It's true, just full on burning the book never works. But sections of it work just fine. Burn a few calories prepping the thing, and it's possible to get a reasonable burn.
Frankly, I wasn't too worried about it being 100 percent complete. A few unburnt bits were no big deal. And it was nice ambiance.
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