Yellow Pages

Here at the Association of Directory Publishers conference in Huntington Beach, CA, the mood seems upbeat and the independent publishers in attendance see blue skies ahead for their businesses, which offer competitive Yellow Pages directories, primarily in the United States.…

Ran into Jonathan Blue of Cobalt Publishing at the ADP conference last week. He pointed out that his company, which publishes Spanish-language directories under the Enlace (Spanish for Link) brand, has moved into its largest market to date by acquiring…

Yellow Brick Road (YBR), the European directories holding company, has come out on top in bidding for Denmark's TDC Directories, the latest publisher to split off from a parent telecommunications company. The purchase price was 650 million euros. YBR, itself…

Speaking at a recent "investor day" event in Canada, Yellow Pages Group CEO Marc Tellier urged the national government to go easy on the income trust model, which has become a popular tax-advantaged ownership structure in Canada. Tellier is clearly…

Interesting article in the San Francisco Chronicle about how some advertisers and competitors are responding to the growth of companion books. The article suggests SBC's use of companions as a competitive weapon against its rival Valley Yellow Pages may be…

At the recent Directory Driven Commerce conference, Ezana Raswork of Canada's Yellow Pages Group gave a presentation detailing how YPG has phased out the inclusion of paid advertising on its directories' front covers. Part of the logic is that the…

Swedish publisher Eniro has been very consistent in pursuing its strategy of shedding assets in small, emerging Eastern European markets so management can focus on making the company the biggest and best publisher in the Nordic markets. To this end,…

We just completed DDC2005 in Denver, and while I may be a little close to the subject, I feel it was one of the better DDC events in recent memory. I don't credit TKG for this as much as the…

This just in, R.H. Donnelley has acquired Dex Media for equity of $4.2 billion and debt assumption of $5.3 billion, for a total value of $9.5 billion, a multiple of roughly 10 times Dex's 2004 EBITDA. Current RHD CEO Dave…

The Swedish publisher Eniro AB is buying its Norwegian rival Findexa A/S for a combination of cash and new shares worth roughly 7.9 billion Swedish kroner (about US$1.01 billion). The deal will further strengthen Eniro's position in the Nordic market,…

We noted several stories last week that reported Universal McCann's longtime ad forecaster Bob Coen had downgraded his 2005 U.S. advertising outlook, which was issued in December 2004. The revised outlook calls for U.S. total advertrising growing by 5.7 percent…

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that RH Donnelley is in talks to acquire Dex Media, an acquisition that would propel RHD into the third position in the US directories market, behind SBC and Verizon, ahead of BellSouth and…

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.…

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…

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…

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…