ARe the Yellow Pages Dead? Should You Use Them To Advertise?

If you think about the Yellow Pages in your phone book, do you automatically just assume that a lot less people use them than they have before? My first inclination when I think of them trends that way, but then I step back and realize that I use them all the time. I mean I spend the majority of my day on the internet while in the office, yet I still pull that phone book out when I want to find something. IT is actually easier than finding it online in most cases I have found.

Why is that? It just becomes way too much work to find a legit online yellow pages for my area. While it should be easier I never seem to find a standard site that helps me as fast as just looking in a book that is alphabetized and categorized already. I don't know if I will ever use the net to find a local phone number. It's way easier to use the book.

So...you use the Yellow Pages to advertise? Well...let me tell you from a person that uses the internet AT LEAST 8 hours a day that I still use it. Now if I want to find weight loss products I may go online, but if I want to find a Lawyer, Doctor, or copy store in my area I am not looking online for it.

Even with just Yellow Pages advertising there are many extras that these places offer now as well. The high-tech changes came about partially out of necessity, admits Bob Mueller, executive director of business operations for AT&T Advertising Solutions.

"There's definitely a transition going on in the marketplace and in local search," he says. "The print usage of Yellow Pages has declined, but only slightly. Not as much as some people would think, but there's no doubt that consumers are going to [more varied] platforms for their local business search information. Local search is not a zero sum game. For an advertiser to have access to all those places the eyeballs are going, they need to have a presence in each of those places."