Battle of the Local Search Brands

AT&T (then SBC) and BellSouth (now AT&T) paid a rumored $100 million for YellowPages.com. Most people in the directory industry now think that was a small price to pay. Mostly that figure was about the brand because the company kept almost nothing of the legacy infrastructure or platform.

Yet even though an arguably great URL, YellowPages.com was historically not one of the top online directory sites in terms of unique users. Now comes this Interchange/Local.com release claiming (based on comScore data) to have surpassed YellowPages.com in terms of traffic:

Local.com has passed Yellowpages.com and is now ranked as the fourth busiest pure-play local search engine, behind only Superpages.com, Whitepages.com and Citysearch.com.

According to comScore, Local.com attracted more than 10.6 million visitors to the site in July, an increase of more than 22% over June, 2006. This placed Local.com as the 79th most-visited website in the U.S., with reach to more than 6% of all U.S. Internet users.

YellowPages.com has been building out distribution partnerships that give it greater reach than simply its destination traffic and I’m sure won’t be happy to see (and may dispute the data in) this release.

Here’s what the non-scientific Google Trends tool shows regarding comparative search volume on those URLs:

local.com yellowpages.com

But for the time being let’s accept the comScore data as accurate.

Let’s consider that Interchange paid about $700K for the Local.com URL (if I recall correctly), less than 1/100^th of the rumored YellowPages.com price. Until recently the company had been burning through money buying traffic. But recently Local.com reached a “positive return on ad spend” milestone. The question is will it ultimately be able to build a brand that enables continued revenue and traffic growth with less reliance on paid search over time?

By the same token, YellowPages.com already has a strong brand. But will it be able to continue to improve the user experience to maximize and leverage the full value of that brand and its investment?

We’ll know in a year.