Yellowbook and Web.com announced this morning a deal in which Web.com will provide stand alone websites for Yellowbook customers. Yellowbook has several hundred thousand advertisers. It’s not clear how many have true websites, as opposed to profile pages.
However, we’ve now crossed the 50% threshold in terms of SMBs with sites. Different surveys show different figures. Our most recent survey found the number with sites to be 53%.
While this is an incremental opportunity for Yellowbook, it’s a major channel partner for Web.com.
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From the Yell corporate site, numbers for Yellowbook (thanks Peter):
Screenwerk 
October 14, 2008 at 2:23 pm
This is a tremendous opportunity for web developers. 99 out of 100 businesses won’t know what to do with the sites. Add a capture page and autoresponder and you can double the conversions.
October 14, 2008 at 6:01 pm
This is a good deal for Yellowbook and Web.com. Yellowbook has been looking to get into the online space with more depth for quite some time. Those sites coupled with the SEM packages that I am sure they will sell should net Web.com and Yellowbook some good revenue going forward. Assuming of course that Yellowbook aggressively sells the services.
October 15, 2008 at 12:23 am
I have always thought that the smart companies will figure out how to own the SMB website as once they have this it’s an easy path to controlling their marketing spend.
October 16, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Control:
The control that is being wielded here is not merely their website, but the customers domain name, brand and identity. I know several local businesses that have had to rebuild their own identity due to being held hostage by their marketing service provider (specifically netobjects.com, incidentally a Web.com property). This move by YellowBook is an effective means of locking in a customer.
Profile Page vs. Website
With the advent of highly customizable web page templates and content management systems; the line between a profile page and a “true website” is diminishing. Our latest profile page templates, are in fact, able to be hosted as a nested profile page or on a dedicated domain.
Best regards,
David Rodecker
Founder & CTO, RelevantAds
“getting local business online”
October 17, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Interesting. How would Web.com hold the customer “hostage”?