If the Yellow Pages suddenly disappeared, how many trees would that save? And would anyone really miss those heavy phone directories that have been around since 1886?
For a growing number of people, the Yellow Pages are an anachronism – a product that no longer serves a useful purpose yet still keeps getting dropped at your door every year. It’s like that unwanted house guest who keeps showing up for breakfast despite strong hints that perhaps it’s time to move on.
In my house, the Yellow Pages (as well as the Super Pages, which, in theory, sounds like it’s superior to the Yellow Pages!) arrives, only to be immediately shoved into a drawer where it collects dust until the following year when the new one dutifully arrives. (Some more creative people find a use for Yellow Pages by enlisting them as door stops.)
As much as we like to dismiss the Yellow Pages, I suspect a lot of people are still using them – probably people who don’t live and breath on the Internet all day. Maybe it’s still easier to flick through thousands of pages as opposed to a quick online search. Maybe people still like the tactile feel of the Yellow Pages.
At the same time, there is no way Yellow Page publishers are going to give up a lucrative cash-cow until advertisers disappear. Yellow Pages Income Fund, Canada’s biggest phone directory publisher, recently posted fourth-quarter results with sweet operating profit margins of 51.9%.
Now, that’s a nice business.
Just for fun, let’s do a poll, although I suspect most people who read this blog isn’t a Yellow Page user.
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11 Comments
Those books you say you never use actually got referenced nearly 15 billion times last year. And that’s just the print versions. 90% of all adults reference them at least once a year, 75% in a typical month, and 50+% on average month. How about on average 1.4X each week?
While the popular myth is that this industry is responsible for the neutering of forests, the reality is the Yellow Pages industry doesn’t knock down any trees for its paper!!! Let me repeat that – they don’t need to cut any trees for their paper supply. Currently, on average, most publishers are using about 40% recycled material (from the newspapers and magazines you are recycling curbside), and the other 60% comes from wood chips and waste products of the lumber industry. If you take a round tree and make square or rectangular lumber from it, you get plenty of chips and other waste. Those by-products make up the other 60% of the raw material needed. Note that these waste products created in lumber milling would normally end up in landfills. Not only that, as wood chips decompose, they emit methane, a greenhouse gas closely associated with global warming. Paper manufacturing thus puts these chips to good use. Many paper providers will also use 5% or less of recycled directories in their paper creation.
The other myth is that the Internet is all we need. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the broadband market is about tapped out. There will always be a good percentage of the population that will never have access to the industry’s Internet products. Barely more than 50% of households in the U.S. (about 56 million homes), currently subscribe to a high-speed Internet service. An additional 21 million households still use dial-up connections (yes, you read that right – dial-up connections).
I think that I just got officially rapped on the knuckles.
Kenc, thanks for the insight.
Mark
It’s funny, my wife and I have a long-running argument about directories. While I can’t stand the sight of them, she continues to use them regularly, including the Yellow Pages, and insists that they are often more efficient than searching online. Now I’d love to claim I’m right and she’s wrong, but while my various start-ups are all in the early stages of figuring out how to make money, our other business, which she runs full time, is extremely profitable. So she must know something I don’t…
I’m slightly chagrined that my 2008 yellow pages directory is still sitting on my front porch, under a snowdrift. It’s too bad that this isn’t something that could be an opt-out service.
Kenc is absolutely right, people who work on-line forget that we are not the average consumer, we search for everything online and we dont click banner ads
My mother is on dial up with no intention of shelling out extra money for hi-speed as she said she does’nt need it. When she needs to look something up she grabs the good old Yellowpages.
Hmmm, could Kenc either work for Yellow Pages or be an interested investor?…
Yup, lots of people still use Yellow Pages. Will they continue? The trends would indicate otherwise. When air travel became popular, there were still lots of people using trains and buses and my guess is the companies were making money. Should people have invested in rail and bus companies at that time?
Listen to an investor call for Yellow Pages…the themes are consolidation initiatives on the print side and growth opportunities on the online side. That should in of itself indicate how yellow pages themselves looks at the markets.
Kenc is drinking the koolaid. There will always be a place for the yellow pages books, just a much smaller place as time marches on.
Apparently you can opt out:
http://www.commoncraft.com/how-stop-receiving-phone-books-and-yellow-pages
Oh and I just noticed that somebody named “KenC” posted similar comments on that other post I referenced too ;+)
I think it really depends on the area and what’s available online. Having lived in the UK for 7 years I don’t think I ever picked up print yellow page book. However now that I’m in Perth, Australia I am forced to as there just aren’t enough small businesses and local traders online. The internet is always my first port of call but I find myself having to dig out the yellow books more often than I’d like to. But the trend will definitely be to move away from the print directories as more online directories become available locally (especially ones, like Bizwiki, that allow businesses to list at no cost).
Even the online version of the yellow pages (canada411.ca) seems useless to me, with none web 2.0 feature. I believe the future of business directories will be wiki-type, like wikipages.com, yellowikis.org, or the canadian wiki411.ca.
I have to give KenC credit for defending a dying industry. Not an easy task.
He seems to forget that woodchips are fungible. If they didn’t go into yellow pages, they would be used elsewhere.
And who cares how many impressions the books get overall? All that matters is that they’re considered worthless to you, so you should be able to easily remove yourself from their distribution.