YP's Reveals Big Mobile Dollars

The U.S. search and directories company YP announced it generated nearly $400 million in mobile advertising revenue in 2013, placing it behind Google and Twitter as the third largest mobile advertising company. YP also reported it has total digital ad revenue of nearly $1 billion in 2013.

?In a rapidly changing digital landscape, we?re proud of YP?s leading mobile market share. We?re making strides this year to drive these numbers ? from YP?s enhanced cross-platform consumer experience to market-leading search capabilities and mobile location-based ad targeting solutions ? and are committed to mobile as a core part of our strategy,? said David Krantz, CEO of YP, in a prepared statement.

YP’s mobile performance is impressive, among legacy Yellow Pages companies as well as among media companies generally. Most of YP’s peer companies continue to capture mobile revenue in the broader digital revenue bucket, but some are beginning to offer some transparency into mobile revenues, particularly as mobile revenue growth is significantly outpacing desktop search revenue growth.

The Nordic search and directory company Eniro, for example, generated SEK 202 million in mobile revenue in the first half of 2013, which is 18 percent of the company’s digital, or “mutliscreen” revenue. Impressive, but lower than YP’s roughly 40 percent ratio. Eniro was among the first directory companies to generate significant revenues from mobile advertising.

In another key development, YP has reorganized to create a separate business unit devoted to the company’s printed product, which still produced a majority of the company’s revenue and margin. The company has hired Jack Freker to take on the role of president, print media solutions, reporting to Krantz. Freker is the former CEO of First Advantage, a company that provides employee background screening services to employers.

A YP spokesperson said the reorganization allows the company to focus more attention on both its print and digital product sets. The change will not impact the sales organization, the spokesperson said.

We’ve been seeing efforts around the industry to divide organizations into business units that focus to varying degrees on print, core owned and operated digital products like IYP and mobile apps, and digital marketing services products, ranging from search engine marketing to websites to reputation management. Eniro, Yellow Pages Group New Zealand, Publicar (formerly Carvajal) are among the publishers pursing reorganizations along these lines.

Unlike with YP’s new print unit, most of these reorganizations have involved some degree of sales force segmentation as well. For example, Eniro has separate sales organizations for its Eniro branded products (online and mobile), it local print directories its media products group, which features performance based products like SEM.