Jingle Networks provides a free 411 service in the US through 1-800-FREE411.  When a user call’s 1-800-FREE411 they listen to a 12 second ad that target towards the number being searched.  Most 411 or number search services in the US are on a paid search of near $1 so the advantage for the user is fairly clear.  For advertisers this provides a key intercept opportunity to reach out to customers searching for competitive products/services.

Under the new agreement Dex One customers will receive prominent placement in Jingle Network advertising.  No commercial terms have been revealed and its not clear to what degree Dex One customers are featured prominently.

Yellow Pages in Canada are still delivered to all Canadian’s households though and Dave Eaves highlights the issue in Condos here.  David also does a good job of highlighting the issue with the opt-out process.  With the end of Phone Directories it doesn’t seem that Yellow Pages Print will be far behind.

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.

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 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.

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.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.

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.

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.

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.