Thoughts on the phonebook and the impact of google search on local businesses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tKjxfQHJlo

Transcription

Phonebooks, yellow pages and your business.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I have a really interesting story that goes along with my business story and the phone book. When I was younger, telephone books for how you found people, okay, they were how you found people that you knew through the white pages of the phonebook.

For those of you who aren't familiar with telephone directories, the pages that are white, we would normally refer to those as the white pages, because those were the ones where you had most residential, people being able to be found.

So if you knew somebody's last name, you could find them in the white pages in most cases, okay.

Then the yellow pages were the pages where all the businesses were, and specifically businesses that paved this phone book a little more to be highlighted on the yellow pages.

And so you have larger ads there and everything else and those are separated by subject. Now, this is for people that aren't familiar with phone books.

In the old days, you get a handful. Actually, when I was just starting out in business, there were three or four phonebook companies, and they were very thick, large manuals, and you would get from and even in a small area, you would get really large books delivered for free.

Because so much advertising went into it and so much money, it was a very lucrative thing. And it was something that entire businesses thrived off of paying for one advertising source, and that was the phonebook.

So this is a phone book. This is the latest one from the yellow book company, one of the only phonebook companies that I see out there anymore. And these guys, this one's for Medford and Grants Pass here in Southern Oregon, also includes Ashland, Central Point, Rogue River and White City.

And I remember when I first started out that they're not as thick as they used to be, they're a lot thinner, there are not as many advertisements very few people are willing to pay for the advertising in back in the day. It actually cost quite a bit to get into the phonebook because you're paying once and this is going to sit on somebody's counter or somewhere where they can reach it, it's going to sit there for a very long time.

Oftentimes way past the date in which, as widgets labeled that this is labeled for 2021, and 2022.

So we'll see how long these exist, I would predict that you're still going to see phonebooks into the future, they're just going to have a different flavor and they're going to go in a slightly different direction.

Because nowadays, as we all know, if you search into Google, it's easier, quicker, faster than going into a phonebook. Google has been able to kind of develop its own phonebook algorithm as long as you're typing in something that can be seen in a phonebook.

Oftentimes, a local section in Google is going to pop up with all the people that fit that category, based on where you're searching for. But also, if you put the name of the town, you're going to see that real quick.

Now, when I first started getting involved in business, this started becoming a thing and phonebook started losing power. And one of my first clients was telling me that they got all their business via the phonebook for years and years and years, 20 plus years, they had been getting all their business via a phonebook ad.