Last night at the YPA awards dinner, Neg Norton announced that Local Insight Media has acquired Hawaiian Telcom’s Yellow Pages unit for US$435 million. This is another significant transaction for Local Insight, backed by the private equity Welsh, Carson, Anderson…
The U.K.-based publisher Yell Group announced today that its U.S. operation, Yellow Book, is seeing a sharp decline in its organic growth rate, the accumulated result of too much competition in the U.S. market. The company is projecting a 3…
U.S. News & World Report features a short interview with AT&T Advertising & Publishing CEO Denny Payne in this week’s print edition (available online). Not much ground was broken in the interview, but Payne got across the usual major points…
We came across this on BusinessWeek Friday. The article raises the possibility that R.H. Donnelley, enjoying a nice run up of its share price, may be the target of a takeover or leveraged buyout. These stories pop up every now…
Last week, Yell Group sold its Brazilian directory operation (TPI Brazil) to regional rival Publicar for US$8.5 million. This was a challenging market for Yell, which inherited the operation when it acquired the Spanish publisher TPI last year. Yell continues…
We’ve got several meaty personnel moves to report in the global Yellow Pages business this morning, most of them involving Australia’s Sensis. The big news is that Sensis has hired U.S. industry veteran Carol Johnson as chief operating officer, directory…
Saw an interesting announcement from Idearc Media that shows the publisher is trying to keep pace with the shifts occurring in consumer priorities. Idearc is introducing a Green Business Guide in its Madison, Wisconsin, book, which hits the streets in…
This article in The Australian summarizes a report on overall 2006 media growth in Australia. It singles out print directories as being a particular drag on media spend. It also notes that once online is stripped out, traditional media overall…
Apparently, those who were worried about AT&T Advertising & Publishing leaving its St. Louis headquarters digs can rest easy. This story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suggests the decision was big news in St. Louis, since it affected more than…
I had an interesting discussion this week with Amy Healy of the Yellow Pages Association. You may recall a few weeks back we blogged about a movement in Norway to give consumers the ability to opt out of print directory…
It appears Yell Group may be the target of an unnamed private equity group hoping to pursue an LBO of Yell, which is the leading YP publisher in the U.K. and Spain and the largest U.S. independent publisher through its…
The latest news on the sale of Yellow Pages Group (New Zealand) is that a partnership of the private equity KKR and Australia's Seven Network has made a final offer of about NZ$2.2 billion, which is about 9 times the…
Just got a press release in my inbox from Yellow Book announcing that it would begin publicly disclosing audited circulation figures for all its directories with distribution greater than 100,000. In the release, Yellow Book makes the claim that it…
Earlier this week I was rereading the transcript of the Nordic directory publisher Eniro's Q4 2006 earnings call, and I paid a bit more attention to an item I had glossed over the first time through, when I was more…
We noted with interest the recent move by Canada's Yellow Pages Group to introduce a companion directory in the Calgary, Alberta, market along with this year's core directory. YPG's decision to introduce a companion book may be related to a…
Bambi Francisco wrote a column today weighing in on the notion of online video ads for local merchants. She recalls the launch, seven years ago, of VYP.com, a site devoted to video ads for plumbers, carpet cleaners and the like.…
AT&T Advertising & Publishing, the new directory organization arising from the combination of AT&T and BellSouth, is beginning to establish a new identity. The company announced this week that it would adopt "the AT&T Real Yellow Pages" as its new…
Canada's Yellow Pages Group announced today that it has acquired Aliant ActiMedia, a small directory publisher in the Maritime provinces. YPG held a minority position in the publisher, though the telecom Bell Aliant owned 87 percent of the publishing operation.…
YellowPages.com has taken the plunge and is offering user-generated business reviews on its national IYP. Here is the release for more details. While YPC is not the first IYP to offer user-generated reviews, its decision does provide more evidence of…
I've seen several announcements in recent days and weeks in the online Yellow Pages space that are worthy of your attention. First, the European directory publishers PagesJaunes Groupe and Seat Pagine Gialle have both launched beta online classified services, offering…
