Yell Unfettered
Yell Group will finally be allowed to set its own prices for advertising in its Yellow Pages directories starting in April 2008, according to a new ruling by the U.K. Competition Commission. For the past several years, Yell has had…
Public Yellow Pages Companies = Full Disclosure
The news has been full of the immense bonuses that are being paid to financial and legal executives because of their companies' incredibly profitable year. The individuals whom we read about tend to be the investment bankers and traders or…
A Tale of Customer Service
On Tuesday, both my wife and I tried to get on Amazon.com from two separate computers. We had the same problem: We were both trying to pay for our purchases through Amazon's One-Click Service, but the credit cards that were…
Welsh Carson on Holiday Shopping Spree
For the second time in two days, Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe has purchased a Yellow Pages business. Yesterday, Local Insight Media, a portfolio company of WCAS, bought "100 percent of the membership interests" of CBD Media Holdings from Spectrum…
Sometimes It’s All About Local and Print
Last week I had the opportunity to attend Yellow Pages Today!, hosted by Peter Buxton and Jesper Simonsen in Vienna. The event, titled "Staying Ahead in Search," was well conceived and executed. The hosts often made the point that directories…
AT&T/BellSouth Merger: Make a Decision
The person who headed up the 1.1 million-employee BellSystem when it was broken up is a Virginia gentleman by the name of Charles Lee Brown. He retired to Princeton, NJ, and I once asked him why he gave up the…
Secrets in the Restroom
The story about Idearc (formerly Verizon Information Services) successfully raising $2.85 billion in high-yield bonds and $6.5 billion of bank debt takes place in an unknown ladies' room. The point of The New York Times column is that big Wall…
All Phonebooks are Local
So, you don't think that phonebooks are a big deal, huh? Well, let's take a look at the incredible noise that Dex caused when it chose to re-scope the Quad-Cities telephone book. The Quad-Cities include Davenport and Bettendorf, IA, and…
No Answer at The Times
In all likelihood, it was just a coincidence. Even if it weren't, it may be the smart thing to do. When I opened my home-delivered edition of The New York Times this morning, out fell a piece of white bond…
World War III
Since there have only been 13 unassisted triple plays in the history of major league baseball, it's highly unlikely that we will see one in this World Series. Nevertheless, a lot of the talk recently has been about a different…
Damn Praise
Sept. 28 was an interesting day on several fronts in the local search and online ad spending business, but I'm not sure that it has gotten sufficient coverage. My colleague Michael Boland did write a brief blog titled "Local Search…
Cool Combines With Warm
Caribe Acquisition Holdings, the incumbent directory publishers in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, has purchased ACS Media Income Fund. ACS Media is the largest publisher of print and Internet directories in Alaska with 10 print titles throughout the state.…
The Theory of Perfect Information vs. Reality
I shop at places like Sam's Club as infrequently as possible, typically once a year before a big Fourth of July wingding that is attended (at least it seems to me) by at least as many people as there were…
The Future of Yellow Pages
What do the largest Yellow Pages company in the world and an independent privately held directory business have in common? Quite a lot it seems. In seeking a way to convey the thinking of the keynote speakers at our upcoming…
What’s Really Wrong With Newspapers
Two articles popped up in my Google or Yahoo! alerts for "Yellow Pages." Both were newspaper articles that related to the Yellow Pages business. They provide a good reason why newspaper circulation is falling: The columns are poorly written, inaccurate…
Advertising Age Gets It
Under the headline "Here's a $14 Billion Print Business That's Loving the Digital Revolution," Ad Age's Abbey Klaassen writes that the Yellow Pages industry "is finding traditional plus digital equals a whole greater than the sum of its parts." What…
Whatever Floats Your Yacht
Like most of us in the Yellow Pages industry, we have taken the 30 seconds or so required to set up both a Yahoo! Alert and a Google Alert for terms such as Yellow Pages, directory publishing or IYP. Today's…
Will a German Trademark Decision Change the Face of Yellow Pages?
Earlier this week my colleague Charles Laughlin wrote about "The Yellow Pages Brand Fight Developing in Germany." In short Deutsche Telekom, the largest communications company in Europe, lost its trademark for the name "Gelbe Seiten" (Yellow Pages), which it registered…
Front Page Ads
The Wall Street Journal announced yesterday that as early as September it will sell advertising in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page or in a strip ad along the bottom of the page of the print edition. The…
It’s New to Us — EMBARQ
The free community newspaper in Princeton, N.J., is called Town Topics. It has been delivered on Wednesdays to every household in town for the past 60 years. Town Topics has great editorial about the Princeton community and is always chock-full…