Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
The old folks really do have it good if that's the case... I'd imagine Thunder Bay is probably one of the smaller cities in North America that still has a 7-day a week newspaper.
I feel for the elderly though, as the size of the print in phone books keeps getting smaller.  |
Our phone book print actually got larger last time, but they still complained it was smaller.
Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
I'm probably one of the last phone book using holdouts, certainly in the under 40 crowd. But even I don't have much use for them anymore as it continues to shrink... the helpful display ads that told you a bit about a business are disappearing as businesses shift their ad dollars to online, so the YP is quickly becoming just a list of businesses and phone numbers with little other information.
Seems to me that phone books were hanging in there during the internet age until smartphones became common... that really hastened their decline.
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It costs about a thousand dollars a year to simply have your phone number included in the Yellowpages. If you want a small, one column wide, 6 lines tall advertisement box, that is about $3,000 a quarter or $12,000 a year. (Radio advertisements here are about $25 per commercial, so it runs around $100,000/year for the larger companies that are getting airtime on a roughly hourly basis). I'm basing that on my company's experience but we run ads in several sections because we provide numerous services, so the price could be compounded but still, it's a lot of money for a questionable return.
The full-page Chinese restaurant menus in the Yellowpages, in Thunder Bay's Yellowpages, are (according to people who have told me such things) $12,500
per month.
A Facebook account is free. In the spring at my work when we're getting ready to renew our ad in Yellowpages we ask customers when they last used Yellowpages. About 90% of them don't use it (about a quarter don't even have phone books anymore) and those who do, have never used it to look us up. Most people find out about us through word of mouth or product placement (we do water coolers and filtration so we're in thousands of homes and businesses).
We stuck with YP this year because of the online component (the site usually ranks high in Google searches) but by being a dominant player in our market and with Google's geographic algorithms, our own website is already a top result for most of the services we provide.
I used to look in the phone book because it had some interesting stuff in the local pages, but since Yellowpages took over the publishing of our local phone book (the city owned telecom used to do that) they've eliminated that, so it's just phone listings and nothing else.
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