Comments on: Yellow Pages No Longer an Exclusive

By: Micheal Smith

Micheal Smith — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:05:52 +0000

Thank you Chris. the question that you ask is related to me. i wanted to ask the question but you had asked it. Anyway thanks.. thanks a lot…
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Micheal Smith

By: Local Directories

Local Directories — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:12:45 +0000

Many local Business directories and yellowpages are saling their informations to google and yahoo
without talk about InfoUsa ! But lets hope for a more democratic local business directories and yeloowpages Market!

By: Russell

Russell — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:39:26 +0000

The yellow pages has a problem because their primary customer is a business listed in their database. That allows other companies like our local search directory, http://click2connect.com to focus as our primary customer on the user of the database. Yellow pages is powerless to respond because of the giant chains that spend a fortune with them that dooms their search results to be slanted away from what users find effective to the businesses that pay the most.

By: chris

chris — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:21:35 +0000

I have a few dumb questions. I’m new at this online yellow pages business.

You said “European players… have shared [their contents] far less with the search engines”

Can you be more specific on which part of their contents that they share with the search engines and which part they don’t? When part of the content is not shared, does it mean it won’t show up in their search results if someone is searching for it?

It seems exclusivity benefits only the yellow pages sites, not the advertisers, because their listings are not as broadly available as they could. Is this right? How would you tell this to your advertisers? Being on those search engines seems like the biggest selling point for them and makes them more willing to pay.

Thanks.

chris

By: Jared Tomlin

Jared Tomlin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:37:55 +0000

I get into this discussion all the time with the owner of our small publishing company. Me not being from the Yellow Pages industry and my boss not being particularly “tech savvy”, we are always butting heads on how exclusive our content should be. I agree that we own a goldmine of content in our database and also have a good way to access the content, but to hold content back from the users is not an incentive for businesses to advertise, it’s a reason for the user to not come back to the site.

By: Ask Bjørn Hansen

Ask Bjørn Hansen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:48:57 +0000

Hi,

Great post. Two comments:

1) I suspect we owe a great deal of the fun competition in this country to the Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Supreme Court decision (basically saying you can’t have copyright on a list of facts – like phone numbers). In other countries it’s often not so, making the incumbent much more comfortable and the competition much less interesting.

2) While I definitely agree on the value of data, I think you are underestimating the value of the technology. At YellowBot we have every business in the country, millions of reviews and hundreds of millions of tags in our database. If I sent that to you – or worse to an average user – in a big zip file; or even in a database format, would that be very useful? No. Without the search engine to help slice and dice and the structure that’s put on the data it’s not worth much. The website and APIs are tremendously valuable, too.

(And in the background there are of course many more things needed to make it spin; for example without state of the art matching and merging technology you’ll be unable to properly process new and updated data as it comes in).

– ask