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Yellow pages

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For the use in computing, see Yellow Pages (computing).
File:Yellow Pages Logo.png

The Yellow Pages refer to a telephone directory for businesses organized by the category of product or service. As the name suggests, they are usually printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages with non-commercial listings. With the advent of Internet, the traditional term 'Yellow Pages' became applied to online directories of businesses.

The name and concept "Yellow Pages" were invented in the USA, over a century ago [citation needed]. The expression 'yellow pages' is used all around the world, in both English and non-English speaking countries. In the US, 'yellow pages' refers to the category, while in some other countries it is a registered name and therefore a proper noun.

In general

Yellow pages directories are usually published annually, and distributed for free to all residences and businesses within a given coverage area. The majority of listings are in plain small black text. Yellow pages publishers make their profits by selling special value-added features to businesses such as a larger font size for their listing, or an advertisement box next to the listings in a category.

Since the mid-1990s, there has been a trend among yellow pages publishers to add four-color printing for some advertisements. Many publishers also offer the option to have advertisements appear with a white background to make them stand out more. Interestingly, most yellow pages are not printed on yellow paper; rather the yellow is printed onto the paper. When an advertisement is printed with a white background, it's part of the page does not receive yellow ink —- so the white is actually the natural color of the paper. This is known as 'white knock-out'.

Online yellow pages

Many publishers now make their listings available on the World Wide Web, on Yellow Pages web sites. The larger of these websites include YellowPages.com which is a compilation offering of AT&T and BellSouth, Superpages.com, which is Verizon's online presence, dexonline.com which is one of R H Donnelley's web based offering and Yellow Book USA which is the largest independent yellow pages provider of print and online we can also add in this list Dazzle Yellow Pages.

The precursors to these directories were the early online directories created in 1995 and early 1996 by companies such as SwitchBoard, Zip2, BigBook, and InfoSpace. Robert Hoffer, one of the early pioneers of web-based national Yellow and White Pages, was instrumental in bringing these directories online, which were later licensed and co-branded with companies such as Yahoo, Nynex, American Express, Excite@Home, Lycos, and others.

The information contained in the yellow pages is essentially a commodity, so publishers often engage in product differentiation tactics like bragging that their listings are more comprehensive or up-to-date. In 1999, a new tactic was pioneered by France Télécom's Pages Jaunes, which dispatched photographers to record nearly every possible view in front of nearly every address in certain French cities. Thus, French Yellow Pages users can see a photograph of a business along with its phone number and street address. In 2004, the search engine A9.com added a similar feature for many cities in the United States when it launched its yellow pages feature. However, Amazon recently decided to exit the yellow pages business and basically disbanded A9.com [citation needed].

With the boom of social networking sites that became well-known to the public by MySpace, FaceBook, CyWorld, and many others, many onine yellow pages have begun to iclude a Web 2.0 element to their sites. The basic method used by most directories is by allowing the public, or users of their sites, to post reviews and recommendations. Some websites have actually begun with only such content generated by users. Some prominent examples of such sites are Judy's Book, Angie's List, and Yelp. Online yellow pages such as yellowpages.com, superpages.com, NigerianYellowPages.com, BoomYEAH and Local.com have combined both the Web 2.0 element and the traditional business directory together, either in a limited scope or in a fully expanded manner, where both users and businesses can upload content.

Mobile Yellow Pages is another expanding market for Yellow Pages. Yell.com and NigerianYellowPages.com pioneered this innovation by making business listing accessible on mobile phones with WAP internet features.

United States

Bell System Yellow Pages Logo
Bell System Yellow Pages Logo

AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth, and Qwest, the four largest phone companies in the U.S., dominate the U.S. yellow pages industry, however, the term "yellow pages" and the Walking Fingers logo was heavily marketed by AT&T pre divestiture, AT&T never filed a trademark registration application for the current and most recognized version of the Walking Fingers logo, so it is in the public domain. AT&T allowed the "independent yellow pages" industry to use the logo freely.[1] The "independents" are unrelated to the incumbent phone company and are either pure advertising operations with no phone infrastructure or telephone companies who provide local telephone service elsewhere.

Yellow pages publishers or their agents sell the right to place advertisements within the same category, next to the basic listings.

For example, AT&T is the dominant local telephone service provider in California, but since Bell Atlantic and GTE merged to become Verizon, it now provides service in many pockets such as West Los Angeles. Los Angeles telephone users can select from telephone directories published by AT&T, Verizon, Yellow Book USA, and other independent publishing companies.

United Kingdom

The first Yellow Pages directory in the UK was produced by the Hull Corporation's telephone department (now Kingston Communications) in 1954. This was distributed with the classified phone directory rather than as a stand-alone publication.

With the encouragement of The Thomson Corporation, at the time an advertising sales agent for the nationalised General Post Office's telephone directory, a business telephone number directory named the Yellow Pages was first produced in 1966 by the GPO for the Brighton area, and was rolled out nationwide in 1973. The Thomson Corporation formed Thomson Yellow Pages in 1966 to publish and to distribute the directory to telephone subscribers for the GPO, and later for The Post Office.

Thomson Yellow Pages was sold by The Thomson Corporation in 1980, at the same time as Post Office Telecommunications became the (then) state-owned British Telecom (BT). The Yellow Pages directory continued to be distributed to all telephone subscribers by BT. At the same time, The Thomson Corporation formed Thomson Directories Ltd, and began to publish the Thomson Local directory, which would remain the Yellow Pages' main, and often sole, competitor in the UK for more than the next two decades, and would be the competitive driving force behind such changes to Yellow Pages as the adoption (in 1999) of colour printing and "white knock out" listings.

In 1984, the year that BT was privatized, the department producing the directory became a stand alone subsidiary of BT, named Yellow Pages. In the mid-1990s the Yellow Pages business was re-branded as Yell, although the directory itself continued to be known as the Yellow Pages.

Yell was bought by venture capitalists in 2001, and in 2003 was floated on the Stock Exchange. After the one year "no competition" clause expired BT too went into competition with the Yellow Pages, re-entering the market by adding similar content to their existing "The Phone Book", adding a classified section to the traditional alphabetical domestic and business listings.

Yellow Pages, Thomson Local and BT's The Phone Book display advertising and can be booked directly with advertising sales representatives.

References

  • "Thomson Directories". TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES & DIRECTORY ENQUIRIES UK 2004. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  • "Thomson Group: chronology". ketupa.net media profiles. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  • "Yell UK History". Yell: UK Operations. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
  • "Kingston Communications - Our History". Kingston Communications - About Us. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

Other countries and regions

World Wide

A

  • Armenia: In Armenia, the Spyur [1] business directory was first published in 1993 in Russian as a copy of the Russian Yellow Pages. By 2000, the directory was also available offline on CD as well as online. The directory currently has a distribution of 5000 copies and is printed in English, Armenian and Russian. Spyur also has agreements with numerous international online yellow pages organisations as well as Kompass International to share data. The directory is distributed free to each business which pays for advertisements and is also available to the public for a fee.
  • Australia: In Australia, the business directory was first published in its own volume in 1973 as the Yellow Pages. The directory was originally produced by the Postmaster General, and continued to be produced by the government, as the telephone system transferred to Telecom Australia and now Telstra. Today, the Yellow Pages is produced by Sensis, a wholly owned advertising subsidiary of Telstra. The Yellow Pages have for many years produced some of Australia's most popular television commercials, often highlighting the perils of not placing an advertisement in the directory on time. The most famous of these immortalised the phrase 'Not happy, Jan!' in the Australian vernacular.

B

  • Belgium: In Belgium, the directory is titled Pages d'Or (French) or Gouden Gids (Dutch), and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber, it is also available online [2].
  • Brazil: In Brazil, the directory is titled Páginas Amarelas and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber.

C

  • Canada: In Canada, the company Yellow Pages Group owns the trademarks Yellow Pages and Pages Jaunes. It produces and distributes directories in both English and French. Yellow Pages Group is the market leader in print and online commercial directories and one of the largest media companies in Canada, producing the official directories of Bell Canada, Telus, Aliant, and MTS. Other ILECs such as SaskTel publish their own directories. In fact, SaskTel subsidiary DirectWest now publishes competing directories in Alberta and Manitoba; as a result its Saskatchewan directories no longer use the "Yellow Pages" brand. Competitive local directories often include commercial directories on yellow paper, but cannot use the Yellow Pages brand.
  • China: In China, the modern yellow pages industry was started in the late 1990s with the formation of two international joint ventures between US yellow pages publishers and China’s telecom operators, namely: a joint venture started in Shenzhen between RHDonnelley and China Unicom (later including Hong Kong’s PCCW and InfoSpace); and a joint venture between China Telecom Shanghai and what later came to be known as the yellow pages operations of Verizon. Later, another mainly state-owned telecom operator, China Netcom began to produce, either directly or on a sub-contracted basis, yellow pages in selected cities around the country. By early 2005, there were a number of independent local and international yellow pages operators in numerous cities including Yilong Huangbaoshu, based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province with operations in Hangzhou and Ningbo.
  • Columbia: In Colombia, the standard yellow and White Pages are published and distributed every year free of charge by Publicar, a Colombian subsidiary company of Carvajal, which also publishes and distributes yellow and white pages in other Latin American countries.
  • Czech Republic: In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the directory is titled Zlaté stránky (golden pages), published by Mediatel, Prague and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber, usually in exchange for its previous version.

D

  • Denmark: In Denmark, the directory is titled De Gule Sider is distributed free to each subscriber, by TDC Forlag.

E

  • Egypt: In Egypt, the directory is published and distributed by Egypt Yellow Pages Ltd (يلوبيدجز مصر المحدودة).

F

  • Finland: In Finland, the directory is called Keltaiset sivut.
  • France: In France, yellow Pages are referred to as Pages Jaunes. They are distributed free by Pagesjaunes.fr, a company affiliated with France Télécom. pagesjaunes.com, the .com version of Pages Jaunes, was the issue of a major court case at WIPO; the original registrant, an individual from Los Angeles, won against France Télécom. This court decision defended by the Parisian Lawyer, Andre Bertrand, was path-setting for the whole European Yellow Pages industry, as it decided that the phrase "Yellow Pages" cannot be considered the property of a single company. Previously, many former state monopoly telecom companies outside the US had tried to ban competition by claiming the term "yellow pages", or the translation of "yellow pages" into the vernacular, as their exclusive trademark. Vivendi Universal moved to enter the French Yellow Pages market in 2001 with scoot.fr, but the attempt was a killed by a reorganisation of the struggling company. Since the liberalization of .fr domains in May 2004, the domain yellowpages.fr has been registered by Phonebook of the World.com. Another French editor of Yellow Pages is Bottin. More competition is expected in November 2005 from the libralisation of "12", the former unique "4-1-1" number of Renseignements Telephoniques, French for Directory Inquiry.

G

  • Germany: In Germany, a directory titled Die Gelben Seiten is distributed free to each subscriber, by the Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile. Other Yellow pages are edited by Go Yellow.de or by Klicktel.de. In 2006 a lawsuit with the Deutsches Patentamt denied the validity of the German Trademark "Gelbe Seiten" which in fact is the German translation of the universal expression "Yellow Pages". Klaus Harisch, an Internet Pioneer from Munich and founder of Go Yellow.de had spend over 7 Million Euros on Lawyer Fees to fight for the cancellation of the German "Gelbe Seiten" trademark. Deutsch Telekom had also registered "Yellow Pages" as a German trademark which they lost at the same time. On a European Level Deutsche Telekom had failed to register "Gelbe Seiten Deutschland" or "Yellow Pages Germany" as a Euro Trademark with OMPI. Different Yellowpages from Germany including Google Yellow can be found via "PhonebookofGermany.com"

H

I

  • India: In India, the national telcom company BSNL dominated the yellow pages publishing and distribution until the liberalisation of the telecom sector. GETIT Infomediary Ltd, established in 1986, is the largest publisher of phone books and Yellow Pages in India. It began and made popular the concept of Yellow Pages in India under the name Getit Yellow Pages [4] . The company prints over 5 million directory copies, which is equal to about 80 per cent of all official telephone directories in India. Indiacom Ltd. is the official publisher for BSNL in the major developing cities of India like Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Gurgaon, Baroda and 32 other cities. Indiacom Ltd also provides other information-based services. Apart from print Yellow Pages, Indiacom Ltd has CD-ROMs and their website www.indiacom.com. Recently, Tata division also publishes and distributes yellow pages. It is now called Infomedia Yellow Pages. Refer to www.infomediaindia.com or www.yellowpages.co.in.

In the small northern state of Uttaranchal (now being recoined as Uttarakhand), Century Yellow Pages is the dominant player with presence through various media like print, CD-ROMs, internet www.centuryyellowpages.com and telehelpline services.

  • Indonesia: In Indonesia, the telecommunication company Telkom with PT. Infomedia Nusantara (one of its subsidiaries), regularly publishes phone books. The phone book consisted of white pages and yellow pages.
  • Ireland: In the Republic of Ireland, the directory is titled 'Golden Pages' www.goldenpages.ie. Golden Pages Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of the World Directories Group [5] which also publishes yellow pages in Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania and South Africa. In Northern Ireland, it is 'Yellow Pages', published by Yell [6], the same company which publishes yellow pages for England, Scotland and Wales.
  • Israel: In Israel, the yellow pages Hebrew edition is called 'Dapei Zahav' (Golden Pages) and the English edition is 'Golden Pages'. The print directories come out in separate issues based on Israel's different telephone area codes, published by Golden Pages Publications Ltd. They are available online [7] (Hebrew and English options). Five million copies of the yellow pages are distributed annually.

K

M

  • Morocco: In Morocco, th4e directory is called Pages Jaunes (yellow pages) and can be found via the URL 'pagesjaunes.ma' or via 'yellowpages.ma'.
  • Mexico: In Mexico, the commercial phone directory is called Sección Amarilla (Yellow Section), while the personal phone directory is called Sección Blanca (White Section). The Sección Amarilla is distributed yearly and free of charge by the homonimous company in association with Telmex; older issues are returned to the company, recycled, and used to print the latest issue. New competitors are "Seccion Amarillas.com" and "Paginas Amarillas.com.mx" as well as "Paginas Amarillas.com"

N

  • Netherlands: In Netherlands, the directory is called Gouden Gids (literally "Golden Guide"), and within the district concerned, it is distributed free to each telephone subscriber.
  • New Zealand: In New Zealand, the directory is printed in 18 regional editions by Yellow Pages Group (YPG), a subsidiary of Telecom New Zealand. Industry & Business Sector Directory, is a newer version of the YPG. It's a business directory with reviews, ratings and awards advising how good a business is. YPG also publishes 18 regional editions of 'White Pages' (combined government, residential and business listings), and a 'Local Directory' for some urban areas and sub-regions. For a breakdown of editions see [8]. There is also a WAP service so you can access yellow pages via mobile phone. Classified listings first appeared on yellow paper in New Zealand in the 1960s. In earlier directories classified listings had often appeared on pink paper. From 2006 print yellow pages now includes maps, coupons and 'life guides' which link advice about major events like weddings, pregnancy, moving home and establishing a business to classified categories. A recent YPG ad campaign involved an online competition. Using only names of categories found in the Yellow Pages, entrants attempted to make witty flow charts telling a story ultimately ending at some humorous conclusion. Winning entries made their way on to various billboards. As of December 13 2006, Telecom has plans to sell YPG.
  • Nigeria: http://www.NigerianYellowPages.com . Content of Nigerian Yellow Pages is available in four formats: Printed directory; Internet directory; Mobile Phone Internet directory and Mobile Phone SMS text directory. It is the biggest online directory in Nigeria, operated by Xybertek Systems.
  • Norway: In Norway the directory is called Gule Sider (Yellow Pages) which is a registered trademark belonging to Findexa, which is owned by Eniro. In December 2005 the Norwegian Supreme Court decided that Findexa holds an exclusive right to the trademark Gule Sider. The second largest directory, is Opplysningen 1881. Opplysningen 1881 is available through a DA service (1881), mobile and the Internet (www.opplysningen1881.no) - A commercial internet yellow pages in Norway is called Yellow Pages Internet Advertising.

P

  • Poland: In Poland it's called żółte strony and is distributed by Polskie Książki Telefoniczne as a part of their phone books. The second largest directory, published by Eniro, is called "Panorama Firm" (panorama of companies). YellowPages.pl - Poland it's the biggest online directory in Poland. Polish Yellow Pages has existed on the market since 1998. Several dozen thousand people visit www.yellowpages.pl each day. Yellow Pages enables them to search companies and products and services, it is a business platform, which helps to promote a company and to establish trade relations. Several historical directories from Poland are available online as scans, and can be searched via the Search Engine for Online Historical Directories.

R

S

  • Serbia: In Serbia the directory is called Zute Strane - Serbian Business Directory (Yellow Pages) which is a registered trademark belonging to Yellow Pages Co. from Belgrade.
  • South Africa: In South Africa the directory is called 'the Yellow Pages' which is distributed by Telkom Directory Services http://www.teldir.co.za/ , a subsidiary of World Directories which also publishes books in Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Romania. There are 19 regional editions covering the nine provinces. Each of the four metropolitan areas has a separate white and yellow pages book. The remaining 15 areas have both sections in one book.
  • Sweden: In Sweden it's called Gula Sidorna, distributed by Eniro. Yellowpages.se is a Portal to different Yellowpages from Sweden.
  • Switzerland: In Switzerland while there is no printed yellow pages volume the company Swisscom Directories AG ([9]) produces and distributes directories in several forms including an internet-based yellow pages [10] in German, French, Italian and English. A map of the telephone directory regions can be found at [11]Directories contain an information section, a magazine, place names, white pages and inserts.

T

  • Thailand: In Thailand it's called Samood Nar Leung and also called Thailand YellowPages. The company Teleinfo Media Public Company Limited produce and distribute yellow pages nationwide. Thailand YellowPages was generated in several forms e.g. paper, Call Center no.1188 and website http://www.yellowpages.co.th including WAP-based WAP.yellowpages.co.th. Thailand YellowPages was produced both in Thai and English.

U

  • Uzbekistan: in Uzbekistan the directory is caled Yellow Pages of Uzbekistan, published by Yellow Pages Ltd.

V

  • Vietnam: In Vietnam directories is produced under title Hanoi Telephone Directory & Yellow Pages, publ. by Worldcorp Holdings (S) Pte Ltd, and Trang Vang Việt Nam (Vietnam Yellow Pages Guide), published by VietBig Joint Stock Company.

See also

  1. ^ http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/federal/judicial/fed/opinions/9_opinions/91-1461.html
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