Every day, I constantly hear my clients tell me that they are cutting back on their yellow pages advertising because ‘no one uses the yellow pages anymore’. I’m sure you’ve heard it too – many people claim the only thing that the yellow page books are good for is firewood. Although this is clearly not entirely true, it’s good to know about the current situation facing the yellow page companies.
What are they losing?
A report called “Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages” was done in July 2008 by Borrell Associates. This report estimated that the Yellow Pages industry will lose 38.9% of its revenue over the next five years because smaller businesses are focusing more on online advertising. It was expected that in 2008, the print annual revenue was $12.7 billion. This is forecasted to decrease to $7.8 billion in 2013.
The Yellow Pages website doesn’t seem to indicate what their current standing is. Here it says that they are “on target to generate 1.8 billion searches by the end of 2007″. Since this information is clearly VERY outdated, it makes me wonder if the reason why they haven’t updated this is because the current number is lower. (more…)