The reports on Yell are pretty much universal now. It doesn't work very well and it's in sharp decline.
The problem is that we all grew up with it, or rather it's big sister, Yellow Pages. If someone phoned you from Internet Directory of Yourtown and asked you to advertise you'd cut him off in seconds. But because it's Yell we all still want to believe that it can make a difference. In a former existence I used to spend £20k a year with Yellow Pages and it was money well-spent. But it's gone (and so has my former existence
). Where is the elusive magic marketing bullet that we all need so badly?
It's certainly not Yell. There are thousands of online directories for everything festering in the bowels of the internet and still trying to leap out of the s*it every time we type our heart's desire into Google. Yell is one of them, and even though it's one of the better ones it's got huge competition. Gone are the days when 'Good old Yellow Pages' was our only instant source of local information. (I don't count Thompson because my Dad always used to do his 'He-Man' impress with it when it arrived and rip it in half).
We (almost) all want extra work and some have got extra advertising £ to spend in order to get it. But we're all sick of being skin-grafted by the pirates who help themselves to our hard-earned in exchange for ... very little if you read the above posts.
So what's the answer? Well, I don't know if I'm right, but if I had just inherited £10k I would be looking at the thing we all use every day - Google. Whilst Yell is sinking without trace, Google made over £5 billion in profit last year selling only one thing - advertising. At the moment it's mainly the big boys who use it, but some savvy smaller companies are moving their advertising to Google and backing it up with a quality website for the simple reason that it is the first place where 80% of the population looks for everything from Recipes to Ryanair. We even use Google when we can't remeber the name of the website that we're looking for. Google is the new Yellow Pages.
I haven't looked into it in any depth - their system of bidding for adwords and maximum daily spend frightens me to death. But at some stage in the future I'm going to try it and so are a lot of others. It's the future.
Everyone's on Google, for everything. Yell is just an old cousin showing up at the party. Reminds me of an old joke for anyone who remembers Watney's beer - "Cut out the middleman - pour Watneys straight down the toilet"
