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by debacle 3901 days ago
I used to work in agency media and one of the reasons I got out was because these companies are starting to cannibalize that industry pretty heavily.

They'll put a half-page ad up for $500 a month, but then also cover all of your digital media (advertising, website, making sure you're on Places and whatever then Bing equivalent is) for free.

They're nailing down these companies who see the web work as a value add for the yellow pages ad, when really it's the other way around. The yellow pages ad is relatively worthless, and they're massively overpaying for their web presence.
2 comments
josephjrobison 3901 days ago
Absolutely - one business I work with is essentially paying YP $900 a month to run a $300 a month AdWords campaign. They throw in a bunch of other "premium YP listing" but analytics shows no more than 12 referrals from YellowPages.
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shostack 3901 days ago
I also dealt with them when I was agency-side. Their offerings for YP.com were the most archaic garbage I'd ever seen. They had some crazy point system where you had to buy various "add-ons" to your listing to increase its point value. These add-ons were things like "red bold" which literally made your listing red and bold. The part that really got me was that these weren't just cosmetic--the total points you paid contributed to your actual placement on the page (ie. position). So in one case I did the math and figured out that even though we didn't have any video creative, if we bought the video add-on, the boost to our placement made it worth our while to just buy the add-on. If they had just let me buy points outright in an auction, I imagine it would be much smoother.

This horribly hilarious animation[1] of Yellow Pages sales reps is fairly accurate IMHO.

The frustrating part is they were able to drive volume for national businesses with local presence. The sneaky part is that they were fairly incestuous with other IYP's (Internet Yellow Pages sites...ie. directory sites) like SuperPages, etc. which we also used, but that traffic was obfuscated to make it look like it was YP.com driving it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98ZY1XMUpxI

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