How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
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How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#2Try 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.
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#3It makes sense, but I gotta say that I don't even take them into my home anymore—they go straight into the dumpster.
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#4This 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.
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#5Try 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.
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?
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#6Try 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.
Things may have changed recently, but online YP searches have typically been just as frustrating. Most of the time, the top search results are paid promotions nowhere near me and sometimes not even relevant to my search.
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#7Specific 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.
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#8It makes sense, but I gotta say that I don't even take them into my home anymore—they go straight into the dumpster.
Same here (although I toss them in the recycling bin).
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#9It makes sense, but I gotta say that I don't even take them into my home anymore—they go straight into the dumpster.
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.)
Re: How Do the Yellow Pages Still Make Money?
#10Try 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.
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?
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.