When’s the last time you cracked open the yellow pages? Really?
Battelle Media
Turns out, yellow page directories are not going away as fast as you might think. In fact, they’re arriving on your doorstep more frequently than ever. So some states are actually considering legislation to make the white pages portion of the directory an opt-in to reduce the size and bulk of the that thud on your doorstep, according to this recent NPR story.
At the end of every year, a new telephone book, usually weighing a few pounds, lands with a thud on doorsteps across the country. The directory is estimated to consume millions of trees a year to produce. But with most Americans now carrying mobile phones, do we still need phone directories made out of paper?
Doesn’t make sense, right? If people use them less, why are they showing up more often? Well, yellow yage directories are hardly a small business. “They produce $13 billion a year in ad sales. That’s more than all magazine advertising combined,” NPR reporter Amy Standen tells us. “This industry has been so lucrative that there are now more than 200 Yellow Page publishers in the U.S. Each year, they print almost twice as many Yellow Page directories as there are people.”
And they are doing well in the digital age, too, although this particular story doesn’t cover that. In various conversations at a local media conference last month in Los Angeles, I talked to several people at yellow pages companies who seemed to be doing just fine, thank you very much. After all, when you type in “Topeka plumber” into Google, you might not think you’re using the yellow pages, but if the result that you eventually click on comes from the yellow pages company, you are.
