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Businesses The Almighty Buck Technology

Demise of Yellow Pages Confirmed as Yell Aims For Digital Transformation (thedrum.com) 52

Posted by msmash from the good-run dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Yell, the parent company of Yellow Pages confirmed the demise of the long published listings directory as it plans to transition into a fully digital marketing service provider for UK businesses. The final print cycle of Yellow Pages will be published in January, 2018 and the final edition will be distributed in 2019 in Brighton, where the first edition was published as a classified section in 1966. Its web directory was launched in 1996.
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Demise of Yellow Pages Confirmed as Yell Aims For Digital Transformation More

Demise of Yellow Pages Confirmed as Yell Aims For Digital Transformation

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  • Jobs (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:10PM (#55137997)
    when folks talk about "productivity increases" this kind of stuff is included. To society at large not printing close to 100 million books is a pretty big deal. That's a lot of resources that can go somewhere else. Thing is, will they? Will those cost savings every show up in the economy at large, or will they just be absorbed by the top? So far as I can tell it's been the latter. At least for the the last 20 years.

    • The "resources" are trees, glue and ink. Not the cleanest method. Somehow the product has to get paid for, in most cases it's small business that pays for it or even tax payers through phone company subsidies. This is thousands of dollars worth of virtually trash (when was the last time YOU used a paper phone book) that is going to be invested in online ads, infrastructure or other forms of investment.

      Money that doesn't move is worthless. The economy has by and large benefited from technological progress. Y

      • The "resources" are trees, glue and ink. Not the cleanest method.

        And at the end of the year, when they're replaced, how many of them get recycled, how many of them end up in landfills, and how many end up being burned, adding to the CO2 being thrown into the atmosphere? How much of the paper used was already recycled, and how many trees had to be cut down, adding to deforestation, just to print them? Printing the yellow pages, or even regular phone books today is just adding to a pointless ecological d

      • (when was the last time YOU used a paper phone book)

        I last used a paper phone book when my internet died and I wanted to find my ISP's phone number and complain.

        nobody chucks their wastewater in the street either.

        Um... RIGHT! I mean, NOBODY does that any more. Because that would be totally unsanitary and just rude to my... their neighbors. Yep, nobody does that.

    • I would expect the company knowing it is having a dying product, would slowly ramp down, by not replacing people who happen to leave the job. Also most people will not try to get into that business anyways.

      Oddly enough for The Yellow Pages, their biggest employee in numbers are sales people as every little line item in the yellow pages requires hours of work to try to sell it to the business. As for the book printing it is mostly automated, and these jobs can be moved to other jobs as well.

      Business die ove

  • Will this Finally stop being delivered? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bigdady92 ( 635263 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:11PM (#55138001) Homepage
    I hate these books, they waste paper, and I throw them immediately in the recycle bin when I get them. Pointless in this digital day and age.
    • https://www.yellowpagesoptout.... [yellowpagesoptout.com] if you are in america.

      • In the USA there is no one company that has the rights to use the trademark "Yellow Pages" and so several do. Whether the particular companies putting dead trees on your porch bother to respect that list is an open question. Where I live they don't

    • Opt out if you're in Australia: https://www.directoryselect.co... [directoryselect.com.au]

      Someone else already posted the US opt-out.

    • I think it's been 15 years that I immediately throw the YP and residential directories directly to the recycle bin. It's about time they stop publishing these antiquated books.

      Now when are they going to stop printing these useless hotel bibles?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      I hate these books, they waste paper, and I throw them immediately in the recycle bin when I get them. Pointless in this digital day and age.

      They have stopped for the most part, at least where I live. 10 years ago I'd get 4 or 5 different ones per year (since anyone and their brother's mother's cousin's daughter's illegitimate laberdoodle can print them) but now it's down to maybe 1 small one in the mail per year. So happy as I did the exact same thing: straight from the porch/mailbox and into the recycle bin (maybe minus any magnets stuck on the front cover). Just wish that last one would give up already but I guess there are still enough peop

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pnutjam ( 523990 )
      I had an elderly neighbor ask me to borrow one once, and my daughter like to tear pages out of them or something when she was younger. But I too pitch them on arrival now.

  • Which yellow pages? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:11PM (#55138003)

    Which yellow pages? I've lived a lot of places, and even the smallest town had more than a few 'yellow pages' directories dropped off at each place I lived each year. And each business I worked for got at least a few contacts on the regular trying to ask for money for special services through those yellow pages.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    The name Yellow Pages isn't unique to this particular company in the US at least. In the UK, this 'yell' group has a trademark, as a a distant offshoot of British Telecom, but nowhere else from what I can tell.

    This may be the first case of UK-centric IP ownership bias I've seen on slashdot. Not a horrible one - but worthy of minor correction.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Which yellow pages?

      The original one, which like a lot of things originated in UK. Great Britain was for a very long time at the forefront of invention, and although it may not be as visible now, we are still punching well above our weight, especially in the sciences. It was one of the important reasons there was a British Empire, and it is the reason why China are so very keen on establishing close relation with UK.

  • Finally won't have to drag the "free copy" that gets pooped onto my doorstep directly into the recycle bin anymore.

    • Finally won't have to drag the "free copy" that gets pooped onto my doorstep directly into the recycle bin anymore.

      Sorry to tell you this, but - this is a story from the U.K. Here in America, various companies intend to continue bombarding us with useless, printed, ad-filled volumes (which indeed just go straight into the recycle bin).

    • You're lucky, in my neck of the woods it gets chucked up on the wrong porch sometime in the middle winter in a halfopen plastic bag. This invariably makes the bag invisible, being covered in 2m of snow slid out bare. So in the spring I get to scrape off a solid brick of paper. Sometimes I even get 2 or 3, one on each porch that is on my house.

  • Ikea (Score:3)

    by kwoff ( 516741 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @05:50PM (#55138363)
    In the Netherlands, you can put "No" stickers on your mailbox to indicate you don't want to be spammed. Ikea gets around it by working with the post office [www.nrc.nl] (google translation [google.com] - hopefully deepl translator works with links soon). If I get it, I'm bringing it to Ikea to drop it on their property.
    • In Canada we can do the same thing but the post office never tells you about it. If you have a supermail box here ask your delivery person or stick a note on your box and say you don't want unsolicited mail. They then put a little red sticker on your box.
  • One of my favourite signs of technological signs of progress is when there is a technological end run. That is when some existing business completely dominates an area. Then some technology comes along and people take a few cracks at getting ahead of the dominating business via duplicating that business in the new way. But then people realize that the old business model is just not applicable anymore and then the old business just withers and dies.

    Sometimes this just happens pretty clearly and fast such a

    • Netflix is on the leading edge of the wedge. Asking what will come after Netflix is like asking what will come after flying cars.

      • I don't so much mean after netflix so much as I think that Netflix is sort of trying to do TV better. Early TV was more radio with pictures or stage plays over the air or a movie box. Then TV discovered what it was, it was something different.

        For instance. I suspect that as Netflix evolves that the whole format of a show will evolve with it. Many people binge watch. So why even bother breaking a series into episodes. Just one 14 hour journey? Maybe?

        For instance many people are envisioning driverless c
  • i just got done searching for "Yellow Pages" and there are dozens of them from all from different developers, no guarentee which ones are authentic or counterfeit, and i should not have to sign in with an account or facebook just to use a phonebook & business directory, so instead of sorting through them all i said to heck with this and i wont install any of them and just use the website via a web browser,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Since anyone can use the original three-finger logo and name Yellow Pages, anyone can make a "Yellow Pages" app. Or print one if they are so inclined.

  • Yellow page companies had listings from every business. In the early days, they just had to put that online, and offer companies cheap web page creation. Nobody knew how to do that back then, and they could have owned the small business market.

    But their job was selling paper directories, and their ossified management could not see beyond that even when the web was screaming in the late 1990s. So they have finally died. The web should also have been gold for newspapers -- they owned the classified ad bus

  • The most important thing to come from the Yellow Pages was this 1983 advert:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Now what will I prop up my monitor with?

    (Actually, I'm surprised it's taken this long for YP to die).

  • Impressive stuff - huge web printers where if you turned them off it could be quarter of a mile of paper before the printer stopped spinning. I wrote some software for them too - automatic pagination for their advertiser's manual. Was a time I could quote you the Pantone numbers of every shade used, and the fonts and font sizes too.

    It was decades ago I worked there and this was a big contract for that firm - hopefully they've diversified enough now to survive.

  • "Not Happy Jan".

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