Bye bye whitepages
So it was no surprise when I read about recent news of potential talks of scrapping the whitepages. Nowadays, if you want someone's number you can merely Google them or even use Free411 to get their number right from your mobile phone.
It's a lot of paper - honestly - and I can say I pretty much scrap the whitepages myself when it arrives bi-annually at my door. In a way, I almost don't want the responsibility of holding it - all that paper - given I know I won't use it. I do keep the small local yellowpages - but even that only gets used maybe once or twice yearly.
This brings me to my main thought - what about the Yellowpages book? There's obviously still the Google option for businesses, Yellowpages.com, Superpages, FindLocal and the list goes on and on. The web is fairly-quickly becoming set-up for small business marketing.
Ultimately, I know there's a market that still uses books - those presumably over 70 years old currently. Obviously, there's not much growth in this sector as the audience will disappear over the next 20 years. So in the immediate term, I wonder how a business like the Yellowpages intends to compete and stay relevant in the coming decade.
Strategically, there's still those interested in advertising and there's still those interested in using the book. However, like AOL's dial-up service - which I can hardly believe still has around 4 million subscribers - it's a business that's shrinking by the month. Tough call for the CEO in either post.
Time to Scrap the White Pages?
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/time-to-scrap-the-white-pages/
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It's a lot of paper - honestly - and I can say I pretty much scrap the whitepages myself when it arrives bi-annually at my door. In a way, I almost don't want the responsibility of holding it - all that paper - given I know I won't use it. I do keep the small local yellowpages - but even that only gets used maybe once or twice yearly.
This brings me to my main thought - what about the Yellowpages book? There's obviously still the Google option for businesses, Yellowpages.com, Superpages, FindLocal and the list goes on and on. The web is fairly-quickly becoming set-up for small business marketing.
Ultimately, I know there's a market that still uses books - those presumably over 70 years old currently. Obviously, there's not much growth in this sector as the audience will disappear over the next 20 years. So in the immediate term, I wonder how a business like the Yellowpages intends to compete and stay relevant in the coming decade.
Strategically, there's still those interested in advertising and there's still those interested in using the book. However, like AOL's dial-up service - which I can hardly believe still has around 4 million subscribers - it's a business that's shrinking by the month. Tough call for the CEO in either post.
Time to Scrap the White Pages?
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/time-to-scrap-the-white-pages/
Back