Older generations still have the habit of newspapers, yellow pages, radio even broadcast TV. As they die, what will the younger generations use? I don’t think a kid that has been exposed to commercial free TV is going to put up with broadcast TV… they already never listen to the radio, never read a paper, hardly ever read a magazine (other than specialty), and never use yellow pages. No early use = no habit = no long term future.

Ken’s interesting take on wood chips was quite comical. Dude, most wood chips are made from trees that are too small to be made into dimensional lumber. They are chipped to be made into paper. Sawdust and wood fines from sawing and planing wood (there are NO chips) is not easily made into commercial paper. YP still eats trees – agreed less than Dennis’ extrapolation.

Until every home (and business) have a computer, until every local service provider has a web site, Yellow Pages will still be useful to the masses. I predict that in 15-20 years, there could be a case to eliminate Yellow Pages.

Thanks for commenting.
By the way, looks like hawthornesearch.com and yptalk.com are both down. You run both sites, right?
Also, if you’d like to write a guest post on this blog, I’d welcome your opinion.

Dennis

There still sold to exisiting customer’s because they still believe in the old traditional advertising methods.

The big search engines are slowly taking over. The rapid growth in cell phones additionally the expansion of wireless internet will all make the Yellow Book extinct.

But agree it’ll be 5-10 more years away

It’ll go away like Encyclopedia Books.

Your comments about the YP industry are completely false.

First while the popular myth is that this industry is responsible for the neutering of forests, the reality is the Yellow Pages industry doesn’t knock down any trees for its paper!!! Let me repeat that – they don’t need to cut any trees for their paper supply. Currently, on average, most publishers are using about 40% recycled material (from the newspapers and magazines you are recycling curbside), and the other 60% comes from wood chips and waste products of the lumber industry. If you take a round tree and make square or rectangular lumber from it, you get plenty of chips and other waste. Those by-products make up the other 60% of the raw material needed. Note that these waste products created in lumber milling would normally end up in landfills. For more information go here: http://www.yptalk.com/archive.cfm?ID=390&CatID=3.

Regarding opt-out, each of the major publishers has had a program running for some time — go here for the site which allows consumers to enter their zipcodes to know which publisher to contact reagrding opt out: http://www.yellowpagesoptout.com