Auctioning the YP

Lots of pick-ups on an AP article that talks about something Verizon’s Eric Chandler discussed at last week’s Drilling Down conference, namely the addition of a pay-per-phone-call feature in the print Yellow Pages. We will write about this notion in a future Advisory or in Local Media Journal. For now, we’ll offer just a few quick thoughts.

First, what Verizon is doing, if it works, is sure to be expanded and copied by others. Not because they really want to, but there is an underlying sense that this kind of thing is all but inevitable.

One of the fascinating things about Verizon’s pay-for-calls experiment is that it takes what print Yellow Pages is all about, generating business leads, and brings it down to its most basic. You gimme lead; I pay you fee based on what I think it is worth (assuming no one thinks it’s worth more). How efficient. And for an industry that is all about high margins and visible revenues, how scary.

Here is the AP article.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Yair Zehavi

    Dear Charles,
    It is always a pleasure seeing you pointing things the right way.
    Well, isn’t this what YP are about – bringing the advertiser and consumer together (back to YP basics) ?
    Indeed a "scary" and wonderful idea, personally, I feel there much more room to innovate and progress in this direction (and I got to admit this is what we are doing for the past couple of years)
    With Local-Search hype and the tons of new players, one can can not help thinking this is one of the things big IYPs got to go for…

  2. Ben Mogil

    Charles

    How similar is the Verizon system to YPG’s Hello Yellow 411 system with Call Genie?
    Thanks

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>