Also this week, a group of private equity buyers acquired Yellow Brick Road, the European directory holding company, from its existing PE owners, paying them 1.8 billion euros, more than four times the cash investment of current owners Veronis Suhler…
Yellow Book USA announced another acquisition this week, purchasing two directories from User-Friendly Phone Book LLC, which is itself a company that has been actively pursuing acquisitions in the U.S. independent sector.The two properties involved are the Steel Valley and…
I saw this item on newratings.com, which reports that Google may be pursuing an acquisition of Yell Group, the UK-based company that operates Yell in the UK and Yellow Book in the US. We do not yet know whether this…
We noted with interest on RHD's latest earnings call that it has removed cover ads from its SBC-branded directories in Illinois, the logic being that cover ads make it harder for the publisher to distinguish its brand from its competitors.…
AdWeek reports this week that YellowPages.com has selected SBC's longtime advertising agency GSD&M to handle the advertising account for YellowPages.com, the company jointly owned by SBC and BellSouth. The magazine estimates the size of the account at US$4 million. This…
BellSouth put out a press release today quoting BAPCO CEO Ike Harris announcing that the company's RealPages.com IYP site has reached 20 million monthly searches. The press release also claims that search traffic has grown by 18 percent from 2004…
About a decade ago, I wrote a lengthy article for Link magazine (anyone remember Link magazine?) about the efforts of the U.S. Postal Service and others to crack down on bogus Yellow Pages scams, which exploit the inattention of busy…
In case you haven€™t noticed, another round of consolidation in the U.S. telecom space is well underway. In one sense, it means less this time around to the directory business than it did the last. When SBC buys AT&T, or…
It was a full day here in Las Vegas €" the land of free drinks that can cost you every penny you have, and where the hotels invest very little in clocks and windows. The YPA annual meeting was packed…
Three technology firms serving different segments of the online directory and local search space have merged in the interest of broadening their collective base of customers and extending the range of services offered. Aptas, recognized for its work in extracting…
Britain€™s Office of Fair Trading issued a statement on April 5 that it would request that the nation€™s Competition Commission begin an investigation into the UK classified directories market. The OFT made the recommendation based on its conclusion that the…
The Swedish publisher Eniro AB has pledged to reduce the decline of its Swedish print business at a faster pace than earlier promised. The publisher saw its print directory revenues in its flagship Swedish market decline by almost 11 percent…
A survey from eMarketer reveals some interesting data on the Swedish online advertising market. Swedish advertisers are moving full force into online advertising in Europe's most wired country. But there is fairly widespread dissatisfaction with online advertising among Swedish Internet…
TransWestern Publishing issued a brief press release today announcing that it has engaged Goldman Sachs to "explore strategic alternatives." Generally, this language translates into, "We are for sale."One question of course is, who is the likely buyer? Yellow Book always…
An article yesterday on bloomberg.com reported that European antitrust regulators have given the nod to the acquisition of Yellow Brick Road by an international private equity consortium. YBR is a holding comany that includes Fonecta (Finland), Mediatel (Austria and Czech…
The Australian directory publisher Sensis continues its expansion into markets traditionally dominated by newspapers by entering the online recruitment advertising business. Sensis makes its move through the creation of a separate business called LinkMe, which will operate as a joint…
The Kelsey Group met last week with Publicar, Colombia's leading directory publisher, and was given a look at the results of recent user focus groups conducted in that country. The results were fascinating to us, because they were so similar…
This just might be a record for the shortest holding period for a private equity investing in the directories business. This morning, Yellow Pages Group announced it will buy the SuperPages Canada business, which Bain Capital had acquired from Verizon…
The nature of local search and its potential for usurpring the strong position Yellow Pages holds here in Europe dominated the morning session at the EADP's spring meeting in Rome. Jean-Marie Guille, who runs online directories for France's PagesJaunes, laid…
Here is a snippet of what we have to say about the Yell acquisition of TransWestern Publishing in an Advisory that will be issued tomorrow to clients of The Kelsey Report: "...a private equity buyer might have found it difficult…
