YellowPages.com’s New Deal with Microsoft

YellowPages.com is replacing Superpages as the local listings provider to Microsoft’s local search and yellow pages sites according to Dow Jones newswires:

Yellowpages.com will begin providing ads in early April. No financial terms were given, and AT&T declined to provide any. Under the deal, ad listings will be served on local sites such as MSN Live Search and Live Search Maps, AT&T said.

The deal gives Yellowpages.com advertisers exposure to Microsoft’s search pages, AT&T said. The deal brings the total number of projected monthly searches on Yellowpages.com’s network to more than 160 million.

Previously Superpages displaced YellowPages.com on Switchboard, through an acquisition of the company.

There may be some money changing hands here; perhaps AT&T offered some incentive to Microsoft. It’s not clear, otherwise, why the latter would switch one listings provider for another with virtually the same content and capabilities.

But swapping in YellowPages.com doesn’t give Microsoft any strategic advantage or improvement in content depth or quality vs. its rivals. Acquisition of Yahoo! would give Microsoft access to a very rich product in Yahoo! Local by contrast.

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Update: Now that Ingenio is part of YellowPages.com, which I wasn’t thinking about in writing the above, there may be another angle here.

Update II: Here’s the Idearc statement (from an updated version of the Dow Jones piece):

“The traffic from MSN had not met our expectations and had not performed as we had hoped, so we would not have renewed that agreement without significant changes,” spokeswoman Mary De La Garza said in an emailed statement. “We are continuing to pursue other opportunities for our advertisers – given that we have a performance-based model and a different strategy than MSN.”