Yellow Pages status report
Greg Sterling has a good recap of recent usage stats for the yellow pages industry, both the print version and online YP sites. His title, “Reports of Print YP’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”, gives away the overall theme.
I’m guilty of saying the print yellow pages are on the decline, and I believe that to be true from personal experience and speaking with others. But Greg says not so fast…
The data show a net gain (combined online + print) of 200 million lookups/references in 2005. And they appear to show that print usage — as the industry has emphatically repeated for the past couple years — is basically holding, while online yellow pages are growing.
But … Greg also adds a couple asterisks to the numbers.
1. The stats are from yellow pages industry research, and Greg says that, while he was working at The Kelsey Group, they had numbers which did show a big decline in print usage from 2004 to 2005, contradicting the YP industry stats.
2. The stats don’t point out who is using print yellow pages, and Greg suggests the affluent and younger users may be using online instead of print.
It’s a good read. The only trend I can really speak to with any certainty is this: I consistently hear from small businesses who want to divert their marketing dollars to the web away from yellow pages advertising. That trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down from where I am.
From my business experience in operating the business for over 20+ years, and tracking sources of advertising we have seen an enormous drop in quantity of responses from the print YP and other print sources.
Its scary. I’d love to know how they accumulate the data. How do they know how often I use YP? How do they develop their statistics.
As a biz operator I’m not enthused by YP or IYP, but my own site is well optimized and tends to outrank IYP across the board. But if the site wasn’t optimized or I didn’t have a site I’d use it.
Dave