Its a bad time to be in the yellow page business. Sales of print advertising is down dramatically, the stock price of the two leading publishers have dropped 99% in the last year, and earlier this week the nation’s leading financial publication published an article titled “Extinction Threatens Yellow Page Publishers“. Ouch!
Perhaps most damning is the article’s repudiation of the Yellow Page’s internet strategy – long hailed by the industry to be its savior. With Yellow Page reps making more money selling the costlier print advertising, the article cites this conflict as the primary reason for anemic online sales. While that may be a contributing factor, I think the main issue is that their internet offerings don’t work – at least in the legal space. I have had many clients that were listed in the various yellow page online directories. In almost every case the client cancelled after seeing the traffic numbers. People simply don’t go to the Internet to use the online yellow pages. They use search engines! I did have a Phoenix family lawyer that saw an incredible increase in traffic after contracting with one of the Yellow Page companies. He was guaranteed 800 clicks a month and he definitely got them. The problem was that most of his clicks came from out of state. To meet their click thru goal, the YP company listed the Phoenix lawyer in all of their directories nationwide.
Sadly I have come to find out that this was not an isolated incident. Matt McClenahen, a Pennsylvania criminal lawyer, shares his experience;
“When I complained to the Yellow Page company that they expected me to pay $650 a month, when I was getting less than 20 clicks per month, they solved that problem by marketing my law firm nationally, even though I am licensed to practice law only in one state. Funny as it may sound, they started marketing my site in all the states that begin with the letter “I.” So suddenly one day, I started receiving calls about people busted for selling meth in Iowa, drunk driving in Indiana, domestic violence in Illinois, etc. When I asked these callers how they got my name, they said that they did a search for criminal defense attorneys in their area, but that my site came up on the right hand side of the screen. They were usually shocked to hear that I was hundreds or thousands of miles away, because they had not bothered to read the basic information on my site, such as my location. Fortunately, only a small percentage of people who clicked on my site through the Yellow Pages pay-per-click scam wasted my time by calling, as most people were astute enough to read my site before calling and were smart enough to realize that an attorney in Pennsylvania would not likely be taking cases in Idaho.”
To date, one of the main offerings of the Yellow Page companies is simply a pay-per-click program, which businesses can sign up for on their own at a fraction of the price. Most Yellow Page companies simply buy these clicks from search engines like Google and Yahoo and then mark up the price far above the normal pay-per-click rate. I can’t see how they can stay viable using this model.