Yellow Pages

For the use in computing, see Yellow Pages (computing)

In many countries, the Yellow Pages refers 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-commerical listings, printed on white paper. 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. The expression "Yellowpages" is used all around the World in both English and Non English speaking countries.

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, its part of the page does not receive yellow ink - so the white is actually the natural color of the paper.

Many publishers now make their listings available on the World Wide Web, on "Yellow Pages" Web sites.

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.

United States

While AT&T and GTE (the two major phone companies in the U.S.) dominated the U.S. yellow pages industry until at least the anti-trust breakup of the Bell System in 1984, the term "Yellow Pages" and the "walking fingers" logo were trademarks, but have been in the public domain since the 1950s when AT&T failed to renew the trademark registrations. This gave rise to a small but fast-growing "independent yellow pages" industry. Directories were published on behalf of the component Bell companies by the various publishing companies. 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, and several 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 "knock-out-white" 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.

References

Australia

Australia's 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.

New Zealand

In New Zealand, the Yellow Pages business directory is printed by Telecom Directories, a part of Telecom New Zealand. Alongside White Pages and Local Directories, it was started in 1988. Recent advertising campaigns include the flowchart advertisements, in which a competition was held online. Using only names of categories found in the Yellow Pages, entrants attempted to make witty flow charts ultimately ending at some humorous conclusion. Winning entries made their way on to various billboards.

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.

Other countries

In The Republic of Ireland the equivalent directory is titled Golden Pages while in Northern Ireland it is "yellow pages".

In Belgium the equivalent directory is titled Pages d'Or (French) or Gouden Gids (Dutch), and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber, it is also available on-line.

In Brazil the equivalent directory is titled Páginas Amarelas and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber.

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 and Aliant. Other ILECs such as MTS and SaskTel publish their own directories and use the Yellow Pages name under licence. Competitive local directories often include commercial directories on yellow paper, but cannot use the Yellow Pages brand.

In Czech Republic and Slovakia the equivalent directory is titled Zlaté stránky and is distributed free to each telephone subscriber, usually in exchange for its previous version.

In China, the modern yellow pages industry was started in the late 1990’s 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 Communications Corp.(NYSE:VZ).

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.

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.

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

In Finland the directory is called Keltaiset sivut.

In Germany a directory titled Die Gelben Seiten is distributed free to each subscriber, by the Deutsche Telekom, owner of T-Mobile.

In India,the public company BSNL dominated the yellow page publishing and distribution till the liberalisation of the telecom sector.Recently, Tata division also publishes and distributes yellow pages.

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. The phone book is updated regularly (typically every six months or a year) and is published in various editions (depending where the book is published).

In Israel the directory is called Dapei Zahav (golden pages).

In Malaysia the equivalent online directory is titled Malaysia Local Search localsearch.com.my (literally "Malaysia Local Search") ; with information of whole Malaysia and is powered by Nexus Online (M) Sdn Bhd.

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.

In Netherlands the equivalent directory is titled Gouden Gids (literaly "Golden Guide") ; within the district concerned it is distributed free to each telephone subscriber.

In Nigeria, the Nigerian Yellow Pages is produced as internet-based yellow pages in English language by the company Xybertek Systems(RC 654937). The company Xybertek Systems(RC 654937) provides additional business information on all Nigerian companies.

In Norway the directory is called "Gule Sider" (i.e. 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, published by Advista, is called Nettkatalogen (Netdirectory), which include both white- and yellow pages, Nettkatalogen lists all the Norwegian companies for free.

In Poland it's called żółte strony and is distributed by Polskie Książki Telefoniczne as a part of their phone books.

In Spain it's called Páginas Amarillas, distributed by Telefónica Publicidad e Información, S.A

In Serbia the directory is called "Zute Strane - Serbian Business Directory" (i.e. Yellow Pages) which is a registered trademark belonging to Yellow Pages Co. from Belgrade.

In Sweden it's called Gula Sidorna, distributed by Eniro AB.

In Switzerland the company Swisscom Directories AG produces and distributes directories in several forms including internet-based yellow pages in four languages, including English. The company Swissguide AG provides additional business information on all Swiss companies.

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 www.yellowpages.co.th including WAP-based WAP.yellowpages.co.th. Thailand Yellow Pages was produced both in Thai and English. In Philippines, Directories Philippines Corporation (DPC), regularly publishes phone books of more than a dozen telecom companies in the country.

In Turkey, Directories Turk Telekom (Ttnet), regularly publishes phone guides of more than a dozen telecom companies in the country. http://www.ttnet.net.tr For firms Guide http://www.turkiyerehberi.gen.tr

In Kosovo, KosovaYellowPages.eu is a trademark belonging to KOSOFT STUDIO, Prishtinë.

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