Bankrupt Yellow Pages Hold On to Print While Planning Online Profits
14. Dec, 2009 
3 Comments
This year, two of the largest phone book publishers went bankrupt. Now they’re planning on coming back with new online publishing goals.
Idearc and R.H. Donnelley both went under earlier this year with billions of dollars in debt. If someone tells you that printed phone books are still important, then just quote Scott Klein, Chief Executive at Idearc.
“There are two kinds of companies in the world: those that change and those that go out of business.”
Of course when it comes down to doing business Klein leans in favor of keeping the phone books alive. Idearc and R.H. Donnelley and many phone book publishers will attempt to squeeze every last bit of juice out of the advertiser in order to keep the printed directories alive because they know that most small businesses will resist or ignore the need to change.
Fortunately with the right facts, we at BizNdex can show businesses that consumers have given up on and are even sick of stale printed directories.
The problem with print publications going online is that they still think like print publications.
If you go to some 100-Million-Dollar branded online yellow pages, you’ll find that the vast majority of listings are simply name and phone number. If someone pays a couple hundred a month online (not including their print expenses) then they may get a little banner ad next to their name.
It has taken years for many of the top news publishers to actually make money online. Their strategy was the same. Keep milking the advertisers to support the print publication while they get their online operations up to speed. Meanwhile it’s the advertisers that suffer.
Today’s consumers are looking for more than just the name and phone number. Consumers want reviews, maps, coupons, hours and locations and some times even videos. All of this is assuming that people remember to go to this site to find their information. Most online phone directories are not optimized for search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. LocalNdex focuses primarily on it’s ability to be found in major search engine results.
With BizNdex you can rest assured that we put the online advertiser and the online consumer experience first. This helps our advertisers get the best return on investment and helps BizNdex marketing consultants provide the best value per dollar for locally owned and operated businesses.
- Tony Darrick Baker
@Brettpowers – Thank You Brett. First let me say that SuperPages is one of our recommended resources. In fact when a company purchases one SearchNdex package, we work with that company to help them get into SuperPages in order to increase their chance of having at least one, if not multiple opportunities to get into first page results on top search engines such as Google.
The second thing that I would like you to consider is that this post did not say that Superpages doesn’t rank well. In fact it does. But as the posts says, in many way even Superpages, which is a veteran in the online directory industry, still focuses primarily on getting people to the Superpages landing page, and from there a user would essentially be seeing more search results of your paid advertisers and unpaid directory listings. This is an old way way of thinking. Consumers want to be able to click the link in Google and see that actual information without having to click again.
Contrary to your reply my research unfortunately shows that the Superpages that surface the best in the major search engines are category pages with results that link to the individual businesses. This still has great value, but in our opinion it is not as valuable and as convenient as having individual businesses profile pages themselves rank on the local search results.
However, with that in mind, we hope that your pages do actually surface better. We are not competing with Superpages or Google. We see them as enhancement tools to help our advertisers that we consult with to get the results that they are looking for.
I might add that we don’t think that Superpages is the reason for why Idearc went bankrupt this year. Once the company separated from Verizon in 2006, they quickly started to acquire properties such as switchboard. This was obviously a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, it appears that Idearc should have trained, marketed and put more emphasis on the importance of online marketing with the salespeople on the streets who were selling the old fashioned print publications. Indeed it is likely that the print weighed down the company and caused it to go over 9 billion in debt and ultimately bankrupt it more so than any online venture.
We’re glad that Idearc has survived and hope that they sell off, remodel, or shut down the print publication quickly so that advertisers do not dump any more money into a media that brags about getting them 60 phone inquiries a year.
We look forward to working more closely with Superpages and Idearc in the near future.
- Tony Darrick Baker
Its apparent the person that wrote this has not worked at Idearc Media. Our Internet Yellow Pages superpages.com is optimized on Google. If you do a local search for a business on Google you will find the majority of the businesses that show up on top will be advertisers with Idearc on superpages. Superpages sets a business up, gives them space for reviews, maps, and a robust business profile. That business profile is picked up by Google and optimized. Superpages is the number one content provider to Google for local businesses so I would do more research when you write posts like this.
This is the industry that I came from and it pains me to see this happening. There are a lot good people in this industry. Several smaller publishers have embraced the online market and have began to help local business, but in large most only have an online presence, only to placate the advertiser. Many times, it is a pdf version of the print book that will never surface well into the search engines. Business owners must be actively marketing their business online to compete in 2010. 33% of small business owners plan to get on board with local search marketing next year.