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?

I first heard of Yodle about 4 years ago, back when it was called NatPal, by Nathaniel Stevens out of UPenn, a friend of Brad Twohig, who is our joint friend.  Since then, I’ve seen the company grow from a few dozen clients to a reported 5,000, bring in a CEO (Court Cunningham), and a whole executive team.  Of anyone in the marketplace, I see these guys as the leaders so far, even though Webvisible and ReachLocal are far larger in terms of customer base, revenue, and staff.

The local advertising game is far from won—- the mainstream has yet to see a dominant player emerge, much less be able to recall any name brands.  As much as we’d like to believe the yellow pages will die an instant death, change occurs slowly.  And I see the most efficient player being able to win.  Yodle.com sells less on force of sales and more on the performance basis of calls driven.  Call tracking is powerful, as clients can see measurable impact.  But the game is early.  Nobody yet has figured out a true multi-channel marketing play that delivers pure ROI for local, even though the search engines, yellow pages, newspapers, radio stations, agencies, and other guys are trying to build their own and partner with others.  Expect to see some consolidation as a result of the economic downturn.

The eventual winners (and I believe there is room for many large players) will be the ones that deliver great value to the clients (transparent results and a large share of the client dollar actually going to marketing spend), plus take great care of their sales, operations, and engineering teams.  Social media is increasingly important, for example, Facebook advertising for local. Trouble now is that building such a team realistically costs $5-10MM, depending on how it’s done.  It takes, by my estimate, a team of two dozen folks for two years to build this out.  The fully loaded cost of a person is about $125k in a major metro.  Add in some marketing and sales expense and you can see how the numbers shake out.

Kudos to Yodle.com for being able to raise another round in a difficult environment.