They’re back! It’s Yellow Page season.
Since Internet usage still is not ubiquitous, I will concede that advertising in the Yellow Pages and/or the Yellow Book may still be worthwhile for some companies, under some circumstances.
But does that make it worthwhile for them to distribute so many of these books? Walk around my neighborhood for weeks after these tomes have been delivered, and you will definitely see that they’re unasked for and unwelcome.
The Yellow Books arrived first, left on the front stairs of our building. (A six-unit condo building with a locked front door.) I dragged them into the foyer, where they stayed a week or so, before I dragged them out to recycle.
Now the Yellow Pages - and maybe the White Pages, too - have arrived.
They are sitting there, shrink-wrapped to the side of the top stoop. I’m in wait and see mode, waiting to see if anyone else who lives in the building will bother to bring them in. (The most I can expect is that someone will rip open the plastic, take one out for themselves, and leave the remainder to get water logged.)
They’ve been there for two weeks now, so I’ve gotten on the distributor’s web site and e-mailed a request to have them removed. That was a few days ago, and I haven’t heard back from them.
I’m a member of The Writers’ Room of Boston, which is located downtown in a small office building. Counting us (and we have one, 15 hour a week employee), there are four very small businesses in this building. (Make that three: on floor is currently unoccupied.) Last week, I counted 27 Yellow Pages in the foyer and outside the front door. That’s probably one for every person who works in this building. Maybe even more. And not one of them bothered to pick up their Golden Book.
The management company finally spirited them away.
Let’s face it, fewer and fewer people rely on the Yellow Pages - or the White Pages, for that matter.
These are truly the buggy-whips of the advertising/publication world.
I feel very sorry for anyone who works in the Yellow Pages Division of Verizon, or for Yellow Book. I know that they get their advertisers to pay based on distribution. And, obviously, people must get something out of advertising in these books, or no one would do so. (Those books don’t appear to be getting any skinnier.)
But I’d like to see how their distribution numbers would look if they asked people to opt in for delivery.
Maybe they could at least whittle down the volume by just publishing an additions book every year, but, that would mean that companies would have to pay for two years at a time to ensure that they didn’t take tat second year free.
But something’s got to be done about this blight on the landscape. And what’s in that yellow dye? For all we know, the unclaimed books just turn into poisonous ooze in landfills.
I’ve gone years without looking anything up in the phone book, and I can’t be the only one.
Obviously, the phone company needs to retain this service for those not “online”.
But it’s got to be a pretty expensive proposition - and not so hot for the environment, either - to keep printing these suckers up, year in, year out, when so very few members of their target audience even bother to slit open the shrink-wrap.
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Those books you say you never use actually got referenced over 13 billion times last year. And that’s just the print versions. 87% of all adults reference them at least once a year, 70% in a typical month, and 50+% on average month. How about on average 1.4X each week?
While the popular myth is that this industry is responsible for the neutering of forests, the reality is the Yellow Pages industry doesn’t knock down any trees for its paper!!! Let me repeat that – they don’t need to cut any trees for their paper supply. Currently, on average, most publishers are using about 40% recycled material (from the newspapers and magazines you are recycling curbside), and the other 60% comes from wood chips and waste products of the lumber industry. If you take a round tree and make square or rectangular lumber from it, you get plenty of chips and other waste. Those by-products make up the other 60% of the raw material needed. Note that these waste products created in lumber milling would normally end up in landfills. Not only that, as wood chips decompose, they emit methane, a greenhouse gas closely associated with global warming. Paper manufacturing thus puts these chips to good use. Many paper providers will also use 5% or less of recycled directories in their paper creation.
The other myth is that the Internet is all we need. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the broadband market is about tapped out. There will always be a good percentage of the population that will never have access to the industry’s Internet products. Barely more than 50% of households in the U.S. (about 56 million homes), currently subscribe to a high-speed Internet service. An additional 21 million households still use dial-up connections (yes, you read that right – dial-up connections).
Ken - I have a hunch you work in this industry, given your command of the statistics (which are quite interesting) - it would be great if you let us know in what role.
As one of those 1 time a year people, I will observe that part of the reason I do that is that the online yellow pages are really, really badly implemented - I’m surprised that the yellow pages publishers haven’t made them actually useful. I find that it’s nearly impossible to get useful local search results out of them (and in fact I rely on Google local search more often, which I think is the biggest competitor).
I do have to take issue with the idea that using 40% recycled paper means the environmental impact doesn’t matter. It’s great that they are using some recycled paper, but that’s still an awful lot of books and an awful lot of paper.
I have to agree that print directories are a waste. Whilst a few may use them regularly, most rarely do. An opt in option is way past due. Yes, as an avid Internet user and marketer for Bizwiki I’m biased, but I’m not alone. According to stats, and recent research http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2008/01/23/new-uk-research-on-directory-usage-fans-opt-out-chatter/ more and more people see the print directories as a nuisance.
to your questions:
YP Talk is an industry newsletter that reaches out to industry professionals with news and information, so yes, I do know a lot about the industry.
Which is why I get disappointed when I read posts like yours.
You mention the impact that YP books have but ignored the facts:
1) industry doesn’t knock down trees but instead are net users of all that stuff you push curbside — how is that not a positive environmental impact, otherwise it would go into your local landfill?
2) print books only make up 0.3% of landfill space. Not my number — comes from EPA. Not your fault that you wouldn’t know that — industry does a horrible job of communicating these things to you.
3) those books have advertising from millions of businesses. think of how much time/gas is saved by those looking for information and providers before they even get into the car.
On the Internet search you use — who do you think has been the people working with these small to midsized businesses to get them online?? It’s been the YP industry which offers a bundle of print and electronic products. But I would still debate with you that it’s quicker to do an online search vs looking it up in a print directory. I find you end up screwing around with the correct search terms to find what you want, and then even then don’t get exactly what you need/want. It will get better, but it certainly isn’t close to being a perfect solution.
To John’s note, be careful how you use Kelsey Group statistics. Print usage in the UK which was never as high to begin with as it was in the US so its a real apples to oranges comparison.