October 7, 2015 by Thumbtack Journal Editors
Disruption can move fast. When Chris Silver Smith joined one of the largest publishers of yellow pages in 1997, he became part of an extremely profitable enterprise. While newspapers and television stations create expensive content like articles and sitcoms—and pay the bills by placing ads next to articles and playing them during commercial breaks—the publishers of yellow pages simply send every single household a thick book of pure advertising.
“The industry seemed so virtually indestructible,” Smith later reflected, that “veteran employees commonly told me that [yellow pages] company stock was a rock-solid ‘sure bet’ and local businesses would ‘always need the yellow pages.’”
The yellow pages veterans were wrong. Today, for many Americans, a yellow pages directory is a fossil from our pre-Internet past, a relic of the days before Google told us everything we needed to know. In 2007, a decade after he joined the “indestructible” yellow pages industry, Smith was the president of a search engine marketing company and wrote an article titled “Yellow Pages Will Be Toast in Four Years.” Within two years, three major yellow pages companies declared bankruptcy.
The yellow pages, however, are far from extinct—even though the Internet lets you find plumbers, DJs, and yoga instructors from a variety of sources, including Thumbtack. Publishers of the yellow pages remain billion-dollar companies, and 68% of Americans still have a yellow pages directory in their home. This is partly due to the relative success of some publishers at launching digital versions of the yellow pages. It’s also because the physical yellow pages are enjoying a long, drawn out, and profitable death.
