”I remember the last time I used the Yellow Pages. I was dismantling a dressing table and needed somewhere to put the mirror. That was about five years ago.”
“For years, Telstra’s Yellow Pages has encouraged readers to let their fingers ”do the walking”. Now Sensis faces the prospect of advertisers doing the walking – from print to online.”
“Few would disagree that a quick Google search on an iPhone will find the local chemist’s phone number quicker than digging the Yellow Pages out of the cupboard. Piles of uncollected Yellow Pages directories at apartment front doors only add to the perception of plummeting demand.”
Those were 3 quotes from Michael Evans’s article in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald detailing the decline of the use of The Yellow Pages and the difficulties that it was giving to it’s parent, Telstra.
Apparently 2010 Full page colour ads in the Yellow Pages in Sydney are $80,000. This is absolutely extraordinary ! The complete lack of value that this will give to any business in any industry especially when compared with investment into Search Engine Optimisation, Pay per click advertising and a name capture database list builder beggars belief. Beyond the enormous financial saving of the latter option, the integrity of it’s statistical reporting creates a huge commercial advantage allowing you to see the exact number of visitors to your site daily, how they got to your site, where they live,how many pages on your site they looked at and what page they were looking at when they left.
Sensis and Telstra say at this stage they will continue producing the Yellow Pages but don’t be surprised if they change their mind…..soon…….Google have a complete stranglehold on online search and increasingly a stranglehold on how we find a business to supply us with a service that we need or desire.
