When I woke up Saturday morning I went to get the Saturday paper and I noticed the new yellow pages, white pages and another small yellow pages book that you can keep in your car had arrived. So I asked my wife do you want me to put these in the drawer where we normally keep them and she said what? No I don’t want those put them in recycling. Now she may be a little biased because of what I do for a living but really she is an example of a common breed of consumer. She has a smart phone (iPhone) which she loves could not live without and if she wants any directory or company information she does not use the yellow pages she uses her smart phone. So all those advertising dollars spent went in the recycling for my family. How many others are doing the same.
Not to mention, when I was recycling these 3 books I thought what a waste of paper, I just hope everyone is like us and recycles. So what is going to happen to yellow pages as the smart phone adoption continues. Take a look around, how many of your friends have smart phones. It is age specific to an extent but I am almost 40 and everyone I know has at least 1 if not 2 smart phones in the family. And they love them and will never give them up. In addition smart phones are not a mature product, they are getting better and better each year, Internet is getting faster and faster. As adoption increases the price will naturally reduce and mature stage adoption will begin. At that point yellow pages paper books will be as skinny as ever or non-existent.
Mobile and online marketing will be the replacement.
Hi John, Carlos here from Yellow Pages Group. I read with interest your posting and wanted to let you know that you can now opt-out of your Yellow Pages directory delivery by removing your name from our distribution list by visiting http://www.ypg.com/delivery or by calling our distribution service directly at 1-800-268-5637. Our opt-out program has been in place for over a year now as we want to ensure we’re providing our users with the choice of how they would like to access our directory information, whether via print, online or mobile. Great to hear you’re making use of mobile search resources. Yellow Pages Group offers a number of online and mobile search solutions that allow our users to easily find a business or service using their mobile devices. In fact, we recently reached a milestone with our YellowPages.ca mobile app which has now been downloaded over 1 million times! If you’re interested, you can check it out at http://www.yellowpages.ca/mobile.
John,
My yellow pages sat on my front steps for a few days before I brought them in and into recycle bin.
Glad Carlos commented about the opt out. Maybe they may want to put together a press release or go all out and run an advertising campaign of the fact.
I can see a huge shift in the next 10 years; Yellow Pages will lose it’s significance.
Im curious about how much it costs to start websites such as Facebook or Twitter. I have been thinking about starting a website for a while now, but i feel as though the initial prices that website design firms give you are for a very low tech and sparsely populated website..