The industry seemed so virtually indestructable that when I was first hired onto GTE Directories Corporation back in 1997, veteran employees commonly told me that YP company stock was a rock-solid “sure bet” and local businesses would “always need the yellow pages”. For the past generations, this was true. Yellow pages companies enjoyed a tremendous profitability over most of their one-hundred-year-plus history. When plotted out over time, it seems unequivocal that print YP usage has been dropping. Also, I didn’t have figures to include from 2011.) (Note: The accounting methodology was was changed following 2007, so figures before and after are not necessarily quantitatively equivalent units, but I believe this graph is still a reasonable representation of the overall declining trend. In the above graph, which was derived from yearly figures provided variously by the Local Search Association (previously named the Yellow Pages Association), one can see that print usage figures have generally been dropping since 2002. Usage of Printed Yellow Pages Books Graphed Over Time population to estimate overall usage.Įven so, it is clear that printed yellow pages book usage has been dropping: There’s obviously no mechanism to independently measure all of the usage, so surveys are conducted along with various other ancillary measures for a sample set of people, and those figures are then projected out across the U.S. It’s not possible to know exactly how much people use print yellow pages. So, did this demonstrate that yellow pages were being used less, and, did the yellow pages indeed become “toast” four years later? What Did This Shift Tell Us About Local Searches? The drop in these searches appeared significant enough to reflect some major shift in consumer behavior - if those consumers weren’t trying to find a YP site to use, or a YP company from which to obtain a phone book, then they must be getting business info elsewhere. Users searching for “yellow pages” in Google were typically trying to find one of two things - they were either trying to find the Web address of their local yellow pages in order to conduct business searches online, or they were trying to find contact information for their YP company (either to order a phone book or to advertise in the yellow pages). So, when I saw the clearly-declining trend line for YP searches back then, it was concerning to me, and it seemed highly likely that the cause probably was that Google Maps (and other local search engines ) were having an impact on both print and online YP usage. Google Trends also showed expectable seasonal spikes for various industries, and rises and declines in cumulative interest in topics (which is the basis for Google Zeitgeist which is also often cited as a pulse indicator for rises and drops in popularity). The clickthrough rate for “yellow pages” searches was a large enough volume with enough consistency to see a correlation with the graphed line in Google Trends, and with some directory usage indicators. I had worked for some years for Verizon’s online YP site,, overseeing analytics, among other things, and Superpages had occupied the top search result in Google for searches for “Yellow Pages” for quite a number of years. I had some basis for believing the Google Trends numbers back then, and for associating them with overall consumer behavior connected to “Yellow Pages” as well as for a number of other types of searches for businesses. (Not to mention, there is uncertainty about what the actual volume of searches is in the graphs since Google obscures volume amounts, and there can be error in assuming that Google users reflect the same search patterns of users who may search elsewhere, such as in Bing.) There are many reasons why people search for a particular phrase, and many reasons why cumulative searches for the phrase can rise or fall. When I wrote that earlier article, I was aware that connecting a major shift in overall consumer behavior to a graphed trendline of searches in Google was a little loose in terms of causality. About four years later, we can now look back and see whether this turned out to be a valid prediction, and also reflect on what value YP may still have for advertisers. In 2007, I took some heat for pointing out that Google Trends showed declining searches for “yellow pages” while theorizing that this indicated reducing consumer interest in print and online YP sites.
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