Demise of Yellow Pages Confirmed as Yell Aims For Digital Transformation (thedrum.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yell, the parent company of Yellow Pages confirmed the demise of the long published listings directory as it plans to transition into a fully digital marketing service provider for UK businesses. The final print cycle of Yellow Pages will be published in January, 2018 and the final edition will be distributed in 2019 in Brighton, where the first edition was published as a classified section in 1966. Its web directory was launched in 1996.

Comments

This is an American website

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the wrong place to post this information.

Re:This is an American website

[Anonymous Coward]

Would have made more sense if they'd tie this into a demise of paper directories, but of course the editor in this case is the eternally clueless msmash so I expected nothing more.

Re:This is an American website

[jandersen]

Yeah, don't scare the natives, who haven't realised there's a world outside the jungle of their own navel fluff.

Jobs

[rsilvergun]

when folks talk about "productivity increases" this kind of stuff is included. To society at large not printing close to 100 million books is a pretty big deal. That's a lot of resources that can go somewhere else. Thing is, will they? Will those cost savings every show up in the economy at large, or will they just be absorbed by the top? So far as I can tell it's been the latter. At least for the the last 20 years.

Re: Jobs

[guruevi]

The "resources" are trees, glue and ink. Not the cleanest method. Somehow the product has to get paid for, in most cases it's small business that pays for it or even tax payers through phone company subsidies. This is thousands of dollars worth of virtually trash (when was the last time YOU used a paper phone book) that is going to be invested in online ads, infrastructure or other forms of investment.

Money that doesn't move is worthless. The economy has by and large benefited from technological progress. You don't see horse poop in the streets anymore and nobody chucks their wastewater in the street either.

Re:Jobs

[jellomizer]

I would expect the company knowing it is having a dying product, would slowly ramp down, by not replacing people who happen to leave the job. Also most people will not try to get into that business anyways.

Oddly enough for The Yellow Pages, their biggest employee in numbers are sales people as every little line item in the yellow pages requires hours of work to try to sell it to the business. As for the book printing it is mostly automated, and these jobs can be moved to other jobs as well.

Business die over time. The Town Cryer was replaced by the printed news paper. As services are replaced by cheaper more advance services the number of jobs required actually goes up. Because the lower of cost of production means they now need to deal with a higher volume. So it still requires more people to do the work. As more people will require the service as well.

Re: Jobs

[techno-vampire]

The "resources" are trees, glue and ink. Not the cleanest method.

And at the end of the year, when they're replaced, how many of them get recycled, how many of them end up in landfills, and how many end up being burned, adding to the CO2 being thrown into the atmosphere? How much of the paper used was already recycled, and how many trees had to be cut down, adding to deforestation, just to print them? Printing the yellow pages, or even regular phone books today is just adding to a pointless ecological disaster, and I'm not going to spend even one second mourning their passing.

Re: Jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Burning paper products is carbon neutral as new plants take that carbon back out of the cycle. Its a long term cycle and requires trees to be planted back.

Re: Jobs

[blindseer]

(when was the last time YOU used a paper phone book)

I last used a paper phone book when my internet died and I wanted to find my ISP's phone number and complain.

nobody chucks their wastewater in the street either.

Um... RIGHT! I mean, NOBODY does that any more. Because that would be totally unsanitary and just rude to my... their neighbors. Yep, nobody does that.

Re: Jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

That only works if the energy and other materials used in the paper-making and shipping process also are zero-net-carbon, which is nowhere near the case.

Of course, the same can be said of recycling electrons...

Re: Jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Recycle elections, what a great idea! Think of all the hot air we would recover!

Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[bigdady92]

I hate these books, they waste paper, and I throw them immediately in the recycle bin when I get them. Pointless in this digital day and age.

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[starblazer]

https://www.yellowpagesoptout.... if you are in america.

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they already had stopped, haven't had one delivered for 3 yrs. And now that I think about it, haven't had a residential directory either.
  But as you say, they're a dinosaur in the digital age, much quicker to search online than thumbing through pages of tiny text.

Although I will miss the shitty joke of looking up "Boring" to see if it still says "See Civil Engineers"

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[Cimexus]

Opt out if you're in Australia: https://www.directoryselect.co...

Someone else already posted the US opt-out.

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[courteaudotbiz]

I think it's been 15 years that I immediately throw the YP and residential directories directly to the recycle bin. It's about time they stop publishing these antiquated books.

Now when are they going to stop printing these useless hotel bibles?

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Canada, it went straight to the bins in the last century already - Haven't seen a yellow pages in about 20 years.

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointless until you have a natural disaster.

But if you want to opt-out, go here: https://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[itsdapead]

Although I will miss the shitty joke of looking up "Boring" to see if it still says "See Civil Engineers"

In other news: the elderly ex-CEO of Yell.com was last seen doddering around second-hand book stores asking if they had a copy of an old book called "The Yellow Pages"...

NB, I received a copy of YP this year, and there's a BT directory for 2015-16 floating around (still in its shrink wrap)... but they're tiny compared to the ones we had in the Good Old Days and even a wimp could probably tear one in half.

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[iggymanz]

In the USA there is no one company that has the rights to use the trademark "Yellow Pages" and so several do. Whether the particular companies putting dead trees on your porch bother to respect that list is an open question. Where I live they don't

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[EvilSS]

I hate these books, they waste paper, and I throw them immediately in the recycle bin when I get them. Pointless in this digital day and age.

They have stopped for the most part, at least where I live. 10 years ago I'd get 4 or 5 different ones per year (since anyone and their brother's mother's cousin's daughter's illegitimate laberdoodle can print them) but now it's down to maybe 1 small one in the mail per year. So happy as I did the exact same thing: straight from the porch/mailbox and into the recycle bin (maybe minus any magnets stuck on the front cover). Just wish that last one would give up already but I guess there are still enough people using them to make them profitable.

Re:Will this Finally stop being delivered?

[pnutjam]

I had an elderly neighbor ask me to borrow one once, and my daughter like to tear pages out of them or something when she was younger. But I too pitch them on arrival now.

Which yellow pages?

[RyanFenton]

Which yellow pages? I've lived a lot of places, and even the smallest town had more than a few 'yellow pages' directories dropped off at each place I lived each year. And each business I worked for got at least a few contacts on the regular trying to ask for money for special services through those yellow pages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The name Yellow Pages isn't unique to this particular company in the US at least. In the UK, this 'yell' group has a trademark, as a a distant offshoot of British Telecom, but nowhere else from what I can tell.

This may be the first case of UK-centric IP ownership bias I've seen on slashdot. Not a horrible one - but worthy of minor correction.

Ryan Fenton

Re: Which yellow pages?

[Anonymous Coward]

How come you end your posts with your name? It's at the top of the post already.

Re:Which yellow pages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yell is the owner of hibu in the States. The directories are usually referred to as Yellowbook.

Re:Which yellow pages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly, The Yellow Pages was originally a US invention which went on to go global, but ironically, the US is pretty much the only place where it isn't a registered trademark. It isn't just a UK thing, although the article is about the UK incarnation, which was at it's height one of the most-distributed directories in the world. Every home and business had one; something like 30 million copies per year were produced. By comparison, the bible sells approximately 100M copies each year globally.

Re:Which yellow pages?

[blindseer]

Just so we're clear, the yellow pages are NOT more popular than Jesus? Missed it by *that* much.

Re:Which yellow pages?

[jandersen]

Which yellow pages?

The original one, which like a lot of things originated in UK. Great Britain was for a very long time at the forefront of invention, and although it may not be as visible now, we are still punching well above our weight, especially in the sciences. It was one of the important reasons there was a British Empire, and it is the reason why China are so very keen on establishing close relation with UK.

Happy Trump Day!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry about YP, the folks will have other jobs soon as the market expands!

Re:Happy Trump Day!!!

[jellomizer]

The new jobs will require new skills. We are already at near peak unemployment (under 5%) but the problem now is the jobs that are open require sills that these 5% of the population do not have.

Re:Happy Trump Day!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what are you saying - I should give up on coal-mining?

Saves me some trouble

[Vektuz]

Finally won't have to drag the "free copy" that gets pooped onto my doorstep directly into the recycle bin anymore.

Re:Saves me some trouble

[93 Escort Wagon]

Finally won't have to drag the "free copy" that gets pooped onto my doorstep directly into the recycle bin anymore.

Sorry to tell you this, but - this is a story from the U.K. Here in America, various companies intend to continue bombarding us with useless, printed, ad-filled volumes (which indeed just go straight into the recycle bin).

Re: Saves me some trouble

[guruevi]

You're lucky, in my neck of the woods it gets chucked up on the wrong porch sometime in the middle winter in a halfopen plastic bag. This invariably makes the bag invisible, being covered in 2m of snow slid out bare. So in the spring I get to scrape off a solid brick of paper. Sometimes I even get 2 or 3, one on each porch that is on my house.

After they attacked Sun's yellow pages, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

screw them. They forced Sun to rename their directory service to Network Information Services, and set them back by years. The commands still start with yp-. It's sad that we're now stuck with Active Directory garbage because BT decided to attack a good system.

Re:After they attacked Sun's yellow pages, ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the kids here aren't old enough to remember the damage BT did to NIS and later NIS+ that came-out in 1992. They hurt Sun enough that that gave Microsoft an opening with their "Active Directory garbage" (to use your words) so that they set back comp sci by decades.

Ikea

[kwoff]

In the Netherlands, you can put "No" stickers on your mailbox to indicate you don't want to be spammed. Ikea gets around it by working with the post office (google translation - hopefully deepl translator works with links soon). If I get it, I'm bringing it to Ikea to drop it on their property.

Re:Ikea

[FeelGood314]

In Canada we can do the same thing but the post office never tells you about it. If you have a supermail box here ask your delivery person or stick a note on your box and say you don't want unsolicited mail. They then put a little red sticker on your box.

I love end runs

[EmperorOfCanada]

One of my favourite signs of technological signs of progress is when there is a technological end run. That is when some existing business completely dominates an area. Then some technology comes along and people take a few cracks at getting ahead of the dominating business via duplicating that business in the new way. But then people realize that the old business model is just not applicable anymore and then the old business just withers and dies.

Sometimes this just happens pretty clearly and fast such as Yellowpages. But sometimes it just sort of happens. For instance Microsoft is just not that relevant to most people's lives anymore. Phones just ate their need for a new PC every couple of years, or potentially any PC at all. Intel is suffering the same fate. Mobile just ate their lunch. They still have a market, but intel inside is something that most people don't see anymore.

This makes me wonder about Netflix. Right now they are upending the entire cable TV world but even Netflix still strikes me as too similar to Cable TV, better, but very similar. Thus I wonder what is going to come along and truly upend TV in general.

For anyone on /. ask a small business owner if the demise of Yellowpages is a bad thing.

Re:I love end runs

[justthinkit]

Netflix is on the leading edge of the wedge. Asking what will come after Netflix is like asking what will come after flying cars.

Re:I love end runs

[EmperorOfCanada]

I don't so much mean after netflix so much as I think that Netflix is sort of trying to do TV better. Early TV was more radio with pictures or stage plays over the air or a movie box. Then TV discovered what it was, it was something different.

For instance. I suspect that as Netflix evolves that the whole format of a show will evolve with it. Many people binge watch. So why even bother breaking a series into episodes. Just one 14 hour journey? Maybe?

For instance many people are envisioning driverless cars as just cars that you don't drive. I see them as something wildly different. Just like people do still watch movies on TV, people will use driverless cars to boringly go from A to B. But I suspect that they will open up use cases that are way different.

A tiny example would be old people. As old people and their friends are at the edge or over the edge of where they can drive. They will favour places that favour them. Thus an old person in a section of the city with tight parallel only parking will get far fewer friends visiting than the friend with the grand circular driveway in the slow easy going part of town.

Then as they all age more, their independence goes more and more. Better nursing homes offer endless chauffeuring for those old people who can't get their kids to drive them places. Lesser ones offer regular bus rides to vaguely interesting places like the mall. But driverless cars will open up so much for old people. This will effectively leap frog so many services that cater to old people and their inability to drive. I can predict a few, but I suspect that once we see the system in action and evolve for a while there will be many "That was obvious" situations that we can't yet see.

my biggest peeve with googleplay is

[FudRucker]

i just got done searching for "Yellow Pages" and there are dozens of them from all from different developers, no guarentee which ones are authentic or counterfeit, and i should not have to sign in with an account or facebook just to use a phonebook & business directory, so instead of sorting through them all i said to heck with this and i wont install any of them and just use the website via a web browser,

Re:my biggest peeve with googleplay is

[EvilSS]

Since anyone can use the original three-finger logo and name Yellow Pages, anyone can make a "Yellow Pages" app. Or print one if they are so inclined.

They should have owned the web

[aberglas]

Yellow page companies had listings from every business. In the early days, they just had to put that online, and offer companies cheap web page creation. Nobody knew how to do that back then, and they could have owned the small business market.

But their job was selling paper directories, and their ossified management could not see beyond that even when the web was screaming in the late 1990s. So they have finally died. The web should also have been gold for newspapers -- they owned the classified ad business, exactly what Google, EBay etc. do now.

THIS IS THE ONLY COMMENT THAT MATTERS: J R HARTLEY

[EnglishTim]

The most important thing to come from the Yellow Pages was this 1983 advert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

celebrate

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a useful service in its heyday.
But I wonder why it lingered so long.
40% still retain land lines.
20% are infrequent or non-users of internet.

CRT Monitor stands

[crispi]

Now what will I prop up my monitor with?

(Actually, I'm surprised it's taken this long for YP to die).

Used to work at Yell

[Anonymous Coward]

At the dawn of the internet era, about two years in, while it was still half BT, half YPSL. Some fond memories.

I used to work at the place that printed this

[mccalli]

Impressive stuff - huge web printers where if you turned them off it could be quarter of a mile of paper before the printer stopped spinning. I wrote some software for them too - automatic pagination for their advertiser's manual. Was a time I could quote you the Pantone numbers of every shade used, and the fonts and font sizes too.

It was decades ago I worked there and this was a big contract for that firm - hopefully they've diversified enough now to survive.

In Australia...

[crispi]

"Not Happy Jan".

british hubris knows no bounds

[Anonymous Coward]

we are still punching well above our weight

brag some more about how britain achieved its status through slavery