RefreshClassifieds

Google is quickly becoming the dominate source for business directory listings.  Sensis announced they have partnered with Google to provide all of their business listings.  Sensis is the leading publishing of business directories and classified products in Australia.  No commercial terms were disclosed on the partnership but Google Australia and Sensis indicated there would be a revenue sharing relationship.

Google has a similar partnership with the Yellow Pages Group in Canada and competes aggressively in the US market with its Google maps service.

It would appear that more deals like this are invitable with the popularity of the Google Maps services and the ability to search business listings.  Business directory provides will need to negotiate with Google if they want to stay part of the advertising relationship or risk advertisers going directly to Google.

Today we saw 2 announcements for very focused directories.  This is an interesting online trend which highlights the practicality of micro directories.

The first is for Roofing-Directory.com which focuses on connecting consumers with roofing contractors that will repair or replace your roof.   The site supports commercial and residencial roofing companies and is currently available in California, Florida, Illnois, Maryland and Virginia.   Contractors are pre-screened with an assurance from the site that they will provide a free estimate before starting work.  The cost is $10 for a lifetime inclusion for a roofing company and free for consumers.

The second directory we saw was local-attorneys.com, which focus on connecting consumers with legal council in their area.  The site includes a variety of different legal fields and is available in most states.  The cost $50 for inclusion in the directory and free for consumers.

Are micro-directories the future?  With web search it would seem to be a good strategy to use these directories to increase your visibility to consumers.  Its not clear how these micro-directories will stand up in the long term though with consumers not maintaining a relationship between the different sites.  The major directories services build up a level of trust and assurance with consumers so that consumers return and re-use the directory.  It will be hard for these micro-directories to build use trust, their biggest value might be as a SEO link provider.

Ziplocal.com has added reviews from Gayot, WaySpa, The Globe and Mail, EYEWeekly and Sweetspot.ca to its directory service.  Users generated reviews can be a great way for a business to stand out in a crowded directory listing.   The challenge with user generated reviews has always been avoiding people that try to manipulate the system.  By combining reviews from multiple sources it looks like Ziplocal is in a good position to avoid this sort of abuse.

Ziplocal has also added a new feature for restaurants that lets users make a reservation with the restaurant via the OpenTable system.  The system has very few listings in Canada though, with only 92 in the Toronto area.  This could be a great differentiator for the Ziplocal in the restaurant category, which is generally a high use and value category for directories.

Brandan Connell, the owner of Rankrover.com, has launched a new human edited directory to compete with DMOZ.   The new directory site is called Nicadema and features the ability accept reciprocal links and paid options.   Reciprocal links are free and paid options start at $9 and go to $21 dollars for sponsored links.   All payments are accepted via Paypal.

DMOZ , the open directory project, contains about 4.6M sites, 70K editors and receives around 2M unique visitors daily.  The DMOZ has become very big and doesn’t currently allow for paid options to separate advertisers.

Yellowpages Corporation is running a video contest for the funniest Canadian video and offering a $500,000 cash price and $500,000 charity donation.   The contest is part of the Yellowpages.travel site launch with positions Yellowpages Corporation in the travel industry.

Yellowpages.travel focuses on aggregating travel offers from a variety of sites.  Users can complete a single search and get results from :

• Expedia
• Travelocity
• Orbitz
• Priceline
• Kayak
• HotWire
• SideStep
• Hotels.com
• other major travel websites

This is a better experience for users since that don’t have to visit multiple travel sites and positions Yellowpages Corporation in a category where directories have traditionally not done well.

The Kelsey group released on the overall growth of the advertising market.   One of the most interesting aspects was the projection that Yellow Pages advertising would grow to $41.4 B, with a combination of the print and online sales.

Through 2007 to 2012 The Kelsey group predicts we will see the following:

• Local search revenues will grow from US$2.1 billion to US$6.6 billion (25.5 percent CAGR).
• Print Yellow Pages revenues will decline from US$27.5 billion to US$25.6 billion (-1.4 percent CAGR).
• Internet Yellow Pages revenues will grow from US$3.7 billion to US$9.2 billion (20.1 percent CAGR).

We don’t think there’s any surprise here in regards to the overall trends with print advertising declining and online advertising increasing.   Over a 5 year spread we would have though the divide would be greater though, with many consumers moving away from the print based directories.

One area of surprise was the Kelsey prediction that Yellow Pages print revenue in Canada would actually increase at 1.5%.  We have a hard time understanding this trend and suspect it might just be a revenue reporting issue with the Yellow Pages group in Canada that is distorting the values.

BusinessDirectoriez.com launched today with a focus on providing SEO links related to key topics to business sites.  While directories have long been a good source for quality SEO links we haven’t seen such an aggressive SEO focus before.  The sites lets business purchase links related to specific keywords.  For example “Motorcycle Trader” is one of the top links and actually links off to “www.usedmotorcycleforsale.ca”.

Pricing for links seems to be flat rates right now at $2 per link but the site pricing uses a bidding system.   Businesses will be expected to bid on popular keywords.  The Site also features deep links to increase your keyword ranking in search engines.

While the site is fairly well designed its not clear  how they hope to maintain any user traffic with the SEO business model.  Without some user traffic we don’t think it will be too long before search engines start to decrease the relevance of these links and the entire Business Directoriez.com site.

Superpages.com announced its release of added user functionality to their site. Superpages users can now update business profiles, add photos and participate in business specific blogs. The added UGC elements will go far in differentiating Superpages against the many existing local online directories.

Traditionally, the directory business has been seen as a utilitarian device. The more aged, well-entrenched directory players consider their jobs to be as an information portal only and because of this mind-set, they have pained as advertisers are finding other online user centric and interactive ways to spread the word of their businesses existence.

The changes idearc is making to their Superpages.com product are headed in the right direction. They are taking considerable efforts to focus more on the consumer and as a result, improving their ‘customer reach and loyalty’ story.

Livedeal ( formerly Yellowpages ) has announced that Livedeal.com and Yellowpages.com have consolidated on to a single technology platform.  While this probably means nothing to most consumers since the experience on both Livedeal.com and Yellowpages.com is essentially the same.

The big impact with the announcement is probably for business advertisers which should be able to use the tools to advertise on both Livedeal.com and Yellowpages.com.  As directories and classified products continue to consolidate it should put Livedeal in a position to save the customer time with a consolidated offering.

Verizon Corporation, provider of personal and business directories in Virginia has settled a long standing accuracy dispute with the State Corporation Commission.  The case focused on over 3000 error claims and could result in Verizon paying $2M in penalties to those effected.  Yellowpages and other commercial advertising were excluded from the case.  The SCC will also be monitoring Verizon directory accuracy and Verizon could face another $4M in fines if it does maintain a 99% accuracy rate.

We thought this was an interesting case in that many Yellowpages publishes also maintain the white pages phone directories in their region.  The Whitepages are becoming increasing unprofitable for companies and its not a surprise to see Verizon trying to save in this area.  We could see more situations where Yellowpages publishers abandon the Whitepages business.