New Print Yellow Pages Usage Stats from comScore-TMP Study
TMP Directional Marketing and comScore announced their annual joint “Local Search Usage Study” today, and there were some interesting statistics:
- Following online local searches, consumers most often contact a business over the telephone (39%), visit the business in-person (32%) or contact the business online (12%).
- 1 out of 5 local business searchers with an Internet-accessible cell phone have conducted a local search via the mobile Web.
- Those that own wifi devices (such as the iPhone) are the most likely to conduct local business search via the mobile Web, with more than half of these respondents reporting mobile local business searching.
- 30 percent of respondents still rely on directories as their primary local business research source, despite a 3 percent decline from 2007 to 2008.
- Traditional IYP sites such as Superpages.com, YELLOWPAGES.COM, Yahoo! Yellowpages.com, etc. account for 60 percent of local IYP business searches.
- Local Search sites such as Google Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, etc. account for 40 percent of local IYP business searches.
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 10/09/2008
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Filed under: Local Search, Market Data, Yellow PagesPhone-Books, print-yellow-pages, yellow pages usage, YP
Local Search & Social Media Company Praized Worth Watching
Praized, a startup that offers a social media app targeted to locally-oriented blogs and sites, is well worth watching. The app allows blogs to easily provide their constituents the ability to rate local businesses, and display the ratings alongside the traditional directory info of biz name, address, and maps.
(Try out their local search engine to view businesses and ratings.)
Praized was built by some local search veterans from the Yellow Pages Group, and it’s already managed to nab small dribbles of acclaim — most recently, it was named a finalist in Red Herring’s Canada’s Top 50 Canada award which recognized the year’s most promising private technology ventures in Canada.
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 09/05/2008
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Filed under: Local Search, Tools, technologyapps, blog apps, Local Search, Praized, Social-Media
Decider Enters Local Search
Humorous faux-newspaper, The Onion, has launched a new local directory site called Decider in beta. While The Onion is famous for its satirical “news” articles, Decider is a decidedly serious guide intended to complement their other offerings like serious classifieds and the A.V. Club (The Onion’s arts and entertainment site).
Decider brings local business listings for bars, restaurants, music venues, events, and reviews. It appears to be targeted to the college-to-early-thirties demographic, and sports advertisements on the pages.
When I heard about Decider, I immediately though, “oh, yet another business directory site among the many others,” — a thought apparently shared to some degree by Andrew Shotland. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 08/28/2008
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Filed under: Local Search, Local Search Optimization, News, Online Directories, Yellow Pagesbusiness directory, Decider, local directory, Local Search
Orion Panel: Tech & Info Giants - 3rd Keynote at SES San Jose 08
The Orion Keynote Panel, “Technical & Information Giants”, touched on fairly broad topic areas this afternoon at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.
Speakers included Matt Cutts (Google Engineer), Rich LeFurgy (Partner, Archer Advisors), Kirsten Mangers (Co-Founder & CEO, WebVisible), Robert Scoble (Managing Director, FastCompany.TV), Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land), and Tim Westergren (Founder, Pandora).
Conference Chair and moderator, Kevin Ryan, framed up the introduction to the panel by using numerous pop culture video snippets to emphasize the impact of Google, social media, and the overall internet on everyday lives. Some of the funnier snippets included quotes from South Park and Californication. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 08/19/2008
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Filed under: Conferences, Local Search, Mobile SearchConferences, search-engine-strategies, ses, Urbanspoon
Print Yellow Pages Usage On Decline Or Not?
My article on how the “Yellow Pages Usage Stats Are Likely Wrong” went up earlier at Search Engine Land, and the details I highlight in it provide some strong circumstantial evidence that this year’s earlier industry statistics stating that print YP book usage hadn’t dropped over the year previous are likely incorrect.
As I point out, those statistics were all based on telephone polling, and those polls missed having representative samples of cell phone only households, according to their published methodology. Various research groups and government agencies have been saying that this is a significant chunk of the population — anywhere from 13.6%, growing to as much as 25% by the end of this year. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 07/29/2008
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Filed under: Advertising, Local Search, Market Data, Yellow Pagescell phone usage, polling, polls, Yellow Pages, YP
SMX LoMo Keynote: Frazier Miller
Frazier Miller, General Manager of Yahoo! Local, spoke yesterday here at the SMX Local & Mobile conference in San Francisco.
It was very interesting to hear the take on local & mobile from one of Yahoo! Local’s top thought leaders. It was obvious that Frazier has a very tight grip on understanding what motivates consumers and where the trends may be headed in local/mobile evolution.
Some highlights of Frazier’s presentation included:
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 07/25/2008
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Filed under: Conferences, Local Search, Mobile Search, YahooLocal Search, Mobile Search, SMX LoMo, SMX-Local-&-Mobile, Yahoo-Local
Australian Yellow Pages Finally Optimizes For Search Engines
The Australian edition of Lifehacker reports that Sensis, Telestra’s yellow pages division, has finally allowed bots to crawl their online yellow pages so links to their listings are now showing up in Google SERPs and other search engines. Previously, they were apparently blocking Google and bots by either using robots.txt disallow rules and/or blocking the bots with network access rules.
Australian Yellow Pages in Google results (click to enlarge)
Amusingly, Lifehacker mentions,
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 07/24/2008
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Local Search Optimization, Online Directories, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Yellow PagesAustralian Yellow Pages, local-SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Sensis, SEO, Telestra, Yellow Pages
Top 25 Things Vanishing from America: The Yellow Pages
AOL’s Walletpop blog has created a list of the Top 25 Things Vanishing from America. They listed “The Yellow Pages” as item number 24, along with such things as outhouses, classified ads, dial-up internet access, phone landlines, VCRs, cameras that use film, and more.
I’ve written before about how print yellow pages usage is decreasing due to the internet and mobile phones, and even internet yellow pages usage may be dropping due to newer generations becoming less aware of what yellow pages are. Others such as Bill Gates have also predicted the end of the print yellow pages while analysts such as those with The Kelsey Group have only predicted a sharper decline in usage of print YP this year, compared with last. [* This last sentence subsequently corrected after publication - see below.]
So, when will print yellow pages ultimately go the way of the dinosaur?
It’s unclear since some analysts have predicted a 3% overall decline per year for printed YP income, while others have stated the rate could be accelerating, with print YPs dying off within about 10 years. Also, some claim the demise of the printed directories is greatly exaggerated, since some smaller and more-specialized directories have seen increases in business.
What is clear is that increasing access to alternative sources of information in the way of internet local search, 411 services, and search-enabled mobile phones are definitely eroding usage of print YPs by some degree.
Yellow pages would seem to have already moved past the tipping point — when people begin listing YP books nostalgically as icons of the past, and when consumers are demanding that YP companies stop dropping books on their doorsteps — it seems like the end may be drawing near. If it is an accelerating business trend, no amount of guerrilla marketing, nanotechnology, and possibly questionable YP usage statistics will prop up the larger companies dependent on this business model unless they diversify rapidly.
[* The sentence in paragraph two originally read "Others such as Bill Gates and The Kelsey Group have also predicted the end of the print yellow pages." That sentence originally only mentioned Bill Gates when I was still drafting it, and I accidentally rendered it incorrect when I added in mention of The Kelsey Group without properly qualifying that they have only predicted some erosion of print usage. The Kelsey Group has not to my knowledge predicted an absolute end of the print YP industry.]
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 07/21/2008
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Filed under: Local Search, Yellow Pagesprint-yellow-pages, Yellow Pages, yellow pages books
Yellow Pages Guerilla Ad Campaign
I was speaking at the Search Engine Strategies (”SES”) Conference in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the YellowPages.ca booth in the exhibit hall:
I’ve seen other, equally-large booths for online yellow pages companies, but this one seemed particularly attention-getting and inviting. The glowing yellow desk and the simple design made the thing very friendly-looking, and the geek in me was drawn to the near-real-time search volume graph they had playing up on one screen. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 06/30/2008
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Filed under: Advertising, Local Search, Online Directories, Yellow Pages, brand namesAd-Campaigns, Advertising, Guerilla-Marketing, Local Search, Yellow Pages
Google Maps Introduces User Review Snippets in Listings
The Google Lat Long Blog announced today that they’ve introduced little snippets of a user review with each business listing for which they have reviews data:
To me, this seems like a bit of an experimental feature, since I tend to want to see a sampling of multiple reviews to try to get a balanced picture of what to expect from a business. Of course, one can click through and view multiple reviews, but why would I only want to see one sample — is there something being done to try to select the most-typical review for the business, or are they only selecting random ones?
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Posted by Chris of Chris on 06/10/2008
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Filed under: Google, Local Search, Mapsdirectories, Google-Maps, User Reviews
