Are you still ruining the lives of your employees/customers?

Very interesting article
I had some history in this industry and I think you missed one point in your Zero sum game theory.
I think that there is a trade between on line and off line YP Medias but I think that eventually the Online will take big part from an current nonprofit media which called friends and neighbors (F&N).

One of the biggest YP competitor along the years were F&N. solutions like Yelp.com , Insiderpages.com and other enlarge the YP market share thus it is not a real Zero sum game.

I’m studding this web 2.0 yellow pages for the last 12 month and also developed a unique model for empowering F&N method, All research I found said that the IYP will grow together with marginal growth in the Printed media.
Regards,

While in the near term, IYP/PrintYP, may not be completely zero sum, I am convinced that it will ultimately be so.

While those yellow bricks of paper will likely continue showing up on our doorsteps for the foreseeable future (two or three years), do you really think that they will still be distributed in twenty three years?

I believe that the comparison to the radio/tv comparison the IYP/print YP misses the mark.

Radio is eminently portable, and managed to survive principally as an automobile based information and entertainment medium.

For all intents and purposes, at-home radio (terrestrial, not satellite) has gone the way of the dodo bird.

Print YP is not exactly mobile. Unless you are short and use the books to sit on so you can see over the wheel.

I think that the more relevant question is whether the game being played out between search engines and IYP is a zero sum one.

I think they cannot give up their status or ambition to be destination sites. But it’s a very different competitive landscape online as you know. You’re probably correct about the media ownership rules change.

Your perspective is consistent with the experience of people in major metros like SF, but you can’t generalize to all the US. I think that directionally what you say is correct but it’s not true for the entire country and for secondary markets.

Regardless, print yellow pages will still be around for a long time. However, the Internet has become (in the aggregate) the primary local information source. That’s a very significant thing. But it’s going to vary by market to some degree.

I live in a low to middle-income building in SF’s Tenderloin neighborhood. AT+T dropped off the big books earlier this week, and NO ONE has picked one up. Literally: not one. There are 30 books lining the walls of my foyer, each under a designated mailbox, and not one has been brought upstairs.

The big book will share the same fate as dictionaries.

I have a friend who’s a commercial insurance agent with a focus on contractors. Those guys are working off the hood of their truck and for him Internet doesn’t fit his customer base as cleanly as yellow pages.

I can think of lots of instances where the book still works better (most of the time).

Will there come a time when the whole world is connected in such a way that print is obsolete? Perhaps.

Maybe it’s because I’m closer to 40 than 20, but I don’t see print directories going away for quite some time.

As your recent posts have shown, Google Local is far from perfect and no place to reliably build a business today… unless you’re a spammer.