Why not Yellow it? Let me count the ways
By Monica Wales,
Yellow is trying to hold its own customers to ransom over their website. What were they thinking?
I
have a lovely client, with distributors nationwide, who has advertised
in the Yellow books for years. Now that Yellow has finally started to
sort its website out so that it actually works (sort of) it is finding ways to milk customers for every penny. Including
my clients.
Now, before I really get into this, let's have a little chat about what Yellow is. Yellow is a directory. It is a whole lot of business listings. That is all. Yellow has something of a monopoly on this game.
So what's got my back up?
Unlike Google, which obviously separates organic from paid results, Yellow has set up a system where the user is ONLY delivered paid search results – at least for the first few pages. But it doesn't differentiate in a way that is obvious to the consumer.
When asked what user feedback there had been around this priority ranking, there was no real answer, just, "I'm sure we have that kind of information somewhere".
Gold, Silver and Bronze listings are where Yellow is at. If you have a free listing, you can end up on the third or fourth page of results depending on the category. Then there are category sponsorship opportunities – three listings that sit above the gold listing.
So, advertisers have to pay to have a gold listing and THEN fork out more to sponsor the category or they'll be pushed down the results even further.
Because my client has a 'free' listing (they spend bucketloads on the books and not online) this means their DIRECT competitors have the ability to advertise on THEIR listing unless they upgrade their listing.
Are you kidding me? Talk about holding their own customers to ransom.
When I had a gripe on Twitter about this, I had a number of responses also voicing their displeasure with Yellow.
Now, I'm yet to see their ratecard, but I am incredibly unimpressed anyway. I know I don't give Yellow a lot of love, but in real life, my clients do.
* Trying to teach agency people what 'SEO' means
* Giving less than 2 days notice to turn material around
* Incorrect listings under wrong titles
*Updating free listings over the phone and 'up-selling' to include a URL but neglecting to mention that website inclusion comes with a $120 pricetag (in this instance)
* Their "insanely over-priced ratecard
When I told the rep I wasn't feeling the love, I was told I could use my client's Yellow 'rewards' – interestingly, these hadn't come up earlier – to reduce the cost of the print so I could shift that budget to online (I can't use my rewards online, only in print). My rep was also very quick to point out that online commission is 20 percent while the book's is only 10.5 percent.
Are you for reals?
I would talk about why Yellow is revenue gathering to get out of its $1.05 billion debt, that perhaps it should just pull back on its awful advertising campaigns instead and that its business is becoming more and more redundant so it doesn't surprise me that they're scrambling for money – but I don't have the energy.
Use your head, people. Yellow gives search results based purely on dollars . It is not delivering the best result for you or your potential customers. Don't give Yellow money for online; spend it on Adwords and improving the SEO on your websites. This makes more sense. When was the last time you heard someone say "why don't you Yellow it?"
Comments
Johnny
Speaking as a Telecom shareholder, I believe the single most sensible decision they've made in the last 10 years was ditching Yellow.
Their search algorithm is rubbish. They must be bleeding money.
They are surely gone burgers.
Karl Rohde
Both Yellow and Finda use the same model. What is interesting is their search results are almost unusable.
Why anyone would spend money on this is beyond me. Ignorance does come to mind.
Peter
If you took the same budget for a gold listing on Yellow and used it on an optimised adwords campaign I bet you would get more customers from the single campaign than an entire year as a Gold sponsor on Yellow.
Yellow's model is a fail when compared to Google Places and Adwords.
Also, Yellow may well be talking to clients about SEO, but there is almost no SEO benefit from listing with Yellow as the majority of their pages have a 0 page rank, and selling links is frowned upon by Search Engines. Buying that link is not actually giving any value for money….
SEM
Why pay Yellow for “just another directory listing” when you can use adwords on relevant SERPs for the same kind of money(or less), staying at least 2 clicks in front of competitors who are just listed on Yellow.fail
Jane
They're also hopeless as a media channel- trying to do banner advertising with them seems a foreign concept to their account managers who push the listings placements only. Countless phonecalls back and forth to explain that you just want to place a damn banner on their page; then to not even receive commission rebate because “only accredited agencies” get the rebate… and to become an “accredited agency” - you have to purchase listings. What a crock!
Sheldon Nesdale
The only question that matters is “are your potential customers using Yellow to find businesses like yours?”.
The paper version may be useful to some people but if a person is capable of doing searching via Yellow online surely they could do their own Google search too? So it's about Yellow online being addictive and consistently saving a searcher time and effort. Does it do that?
If not, it better start innovating or they are dead.
Drew Williams
Wow, so people actually still use the Yellow Pages? I thought the only thing of use in those was the Civil Defense messaging. For everything else, there's the google…
Troy McClure
I use Yellow Pages every day.
It holds up my monitor so I can view my screen in a more ergonomic way.
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