[gist]

What's interesting is that this is moving more and more in the direction of the tried and trusted legacy yellow pages phonebook model.

In that model you got a free listing in a category or two but had to pay to get either additional listings (in other categories) or for an advertisement (of various sizes) in order to get phone calls. The rationale (in addition to making money obviously) was that there had to be a way to determine the serious people trying to hawk a particular or good or service from the casual players. The thinking was that if a person took out a listing or an ad saying they "sold recumbent bicycles" they must be doing that because they were willing to pay to say so. So the theory is if you pay for say something you must be fairly serious about what you are saying (in terms of things you are selling).

[marcosdumay]

Google got the entire search business (including from those yellow pages) exactly because it wasn't a yellow pages company.

It showed people what they wanted to see, while other companies were focusing on what they were paid to show.

[Retra]

That's probably because people aren't by default searching the internet for services, but for information and news.

[tyingq]

Ah, but without the loophole of naming your company "AAAAAAAAA Services" to land at the top of "organics" :)

[gist]

My gaming of the system was putting a display ad with multiple phone numbers representing different areas of the city. Worked very well. Learned that by observing what other businesses did (in entirely different areas I might add) and figuring that must be the reason (since I knew they didn't have all of those locations). Yellow pages, at least for what I did (was a "well developed category") was instant business and paid off very well. I increased the ad size every year. In some cases ran a small and large ad after being told (correctly) that some people liked to deal with a small company and some a large company. I landed a big contract once with the larger ad when only 3 companies were asked to bid.

All this was well before the internet when there wasn't step by step guides and/or blog posts and things like this were never taught you either figured them out on your old or someone you knew was nice enough to tell you. (In the old days it wasn't typical to share info and secrets like it is today..)

[0x0]

Fun fact, in some northern european countries "aa" is sorted last in the alphabet :)