Yellow Pages 2.0

One the biggest advertising expenses for business in local markets is the Yellow Pages. The pulp product has been around as long as people have been using the telephone. The problem today is that if you’re spending money on Yellow Page ads to reach the 40 somethings and below you’re wasting about every penny you put into it. This group of buyers are using local searches on the Internet or using social network sites to locate business in their area.

AT&T doesn’t want to lose any advertisers to social networks. In the first quarter of the year they brought in $1.3 billion in sales. In an effort to have a product that will reach an audience of younger buyers AT&T is rolling out a sister website the Yellow Pages website.

In an article on Forbes tells that AT&T will be rolling out a new website that marries the Yellow Pages with a social network. The mix may be a hard to compete against online heavy weights like Facebook and Google Adwords, but AT&T has something the new media companies doesn’t. A five thousand person sales force on the ground in every market.

The timing to compete against Facebook may have gotten easier for AT&T. Over the pass few weeks Facebook has been dealing with the issue of click fraud on advertising running on their network and working to fix the problem. Facebok did not make the problem known publicly or take any action until enough advertisers complained on message boards and blogs.

Click fraud is nothing new to the Internet. It is a common practice that a website does not get paid any money to run an ad and only gets paid when someone clicks an ad. Some website operators sign-up for an advertising program and just begin clicking the ads hoping to cash in undetected. It’s not been said if the fraud was done by someone working at the direction of Facebook or if the clicks were coming from someone wanting to run up a competitor’s ad spending.

While AT&T is working to deploy their newer Yellow Page venture it the perfect opportunity for newspapers to reboot their local online directory as well. Most newspapers already have some type directory incorporated in their news website. But few have added web 2.0 features to their directories took keep viewers on the site longer and have them coming back. For years newspapers have had to compete against the Yellow Pages trying to prove that money spent on a local newspaper ad campaign has a better ROI than the Yellow Pages. Now is the opportunity to over take the Yellows Pages as people are abandoning them.