It seems that Facebook is in the reviews game with their questions about your favorite places and apps. Is Facebook the sleeper that will kill off Yelp and other review sites? If past history is any indicator, they are the king at amassing user generated content.
There are 540 million directories printed in the United States each year. That’s 1.7 directories per person, assuming just over 300 million people living in the US. There is not one “yellow pages” company, so it’s many companies printing many books.
The average yellow pages book weighs 3.62 pounds. Multiply that by the 540 million directories printed each year and you get 2 BILLION pounds of paper. It takes 24 fully developed trees to make a ton of paper. So you’re looking at 23 million trees each year being cut down to make these books.
The yellow pages industry is a $26 billion annual business, bigger than Google’s $20 billion in revenues for 2008. The yellow pages are profitable and are not dying anytime soon. Most publishers have recycling programs, to quell the environmentalists that protest the waste– but almost none have an opt-out program.
Online advertising programs are cutting into offline revenue. I don’t believe web advertising would ever fully replace print, TV, radio, magazine, and other forms of media– but it will become a growing share over the next 5-10 years.
What say you?
Not much more needs to be said about this. Gotta wonder how this ad was approved by Facebook. The guy is naked and she probably is, too. What do you think the advertiser was targeting– old guys who say “creeper” in their profile? This is worse than the “date a cougar” ads from a few weeks ago.
3 months ago Microsoft spent $100 million to launch BING search. And now Yahoo! has followed suit, spending another $100 million for their own branding campaign. All the while Google and Facebook are laughing at the big company mentality for marketing– to spend money on traditional advertising.
If your search quality hasn’t changed, then invest the $100 million to build a better product, not to just advertise.
Yahoo’s new ad campaign is called “It’s You”, which harkens back to the Life Engine campaign of several years ago– lots of purple. What I want to know is– how is the new Yahoo! about me, as they claim?
