Yellow pages gone bust - Now with the banks

[Mike Hughes]

I see Yellow Pages/ Hibu has effectively gone bust with creditors taking control of the company. It looks as if there'll be massive layoffs coming as they still have around 12,000 employees.

There are plenty of reports in the news but you might have to read a few to get the full picture.

What amazes me is that out of total revenue of £1.3bn, only around 13% is from digital (£174M), and there's still around £900M from the directories business, although that's down 22% over the year and maybe explains what their problem is. The directories business dropping by £250M a year and digital not growing enough to make any real difference.

I suspect it's just going to get worse in the near future. Yellow Pages advertisers fell 16% in the full year to 868,000, while revenue per advertiser dropped 6% to £923. I find that a surprisingly high figure and at some point soon the number of directories advertisers is probably going to go into freefall.

Does anyone here still see value in advertising in the yellow pages directories?

Mike

[saucysal]

No

I used to agree to free listings if they rang me, but found them the listings a nuisance as they were put in the wrong classifications. There was never any evidence of any benefit, but evidence of time wasted answering telephone calls that were irrelevant to our business. As a result of this, I never agreed to pay for a listing.

For example, I design and sell counted cross stitch embroidery kits of British military aircraft (not many people do that), for the customer to stitch by hand to make a picture. They put this under embroidery suppliers, which caused a lot of calls from Pakistan offering digitising services, and calls from the UK wanting logos machine embroidered on their corporate t-shirts, etc.

Sarah

[Buzby]

We haven't used any paid for ads with them for about 5 years despite receiving half a dozen pushy calls from them each year.

If we want something we Google it, why go to an out dated telephone directory.