Yellow Pages Association Blog

In his remarks this morning, Dave Swanson talked about the importance of breaking down our business and remembering that we’re “not one homogenous search business.” So it was appropriate to follow his remarks with some vertical case studies.

EveryCarList.com

The first panelist was Darrell Campbell, CEO of EveryCarList.com. EveryCarListed is the automotive listing service run for Idearc (it has a tab on Superpages.com). Today, there are over two million vehicles on the site and one million videos of individual cars, all as more people than ever are going online to look for cars.

Darrell talked about the vast opportunity in this space, despite a tough year for the auto industry and dealerships. It’s a highly used headings category, easily bundled with other Yellow Pages solutions, and is growing rapidly – from $1.1 billion in 2006 to $8.5 billion this year. The site offers trackable leads to dealers – enabling consumers to send their contact information directly to dealers to enquire about a specific vehicle.

ServiceMagic

You may have seen commercials for ServiceMagic (if you haven’t, see below), which has built a “trusted” place for consumers to find home service professionals. CEO Craig Smith said there was 27% growth in service requests between 2007 and 2008. And with a lot of discussion here at Kelsey focused on ratings and reviews, it’s worth noting that ServiceMagic houses 600,000 verified ratings and reviews for its advertisers.

Craig said that 79% of ServiceMagic’s customers have never spent money on Yellow Pages, so a whole new market is being tapped. In fact, 73% have five or fewer employees, 60% don’t have a Web site and 34% spend less than $1,000 on advertising.  In that way, ServiceMagic is able to help level the playing field for these very small businesses.

Healthcare.com

Certainly a relevant panelist given the current political debate, Howeard Yeh, vice president of corporate development, introduced this site that helps people find various types of health insurance. It’s a 100% performance-based model – the pay-per-click approach that many advertisers are looking for.

Healthcare.com seems to be breaking new ground here. Health insurance hasn’t found much traction online yet, given that it’s highly regulated by state and the product nature is inherently complex. This all makes selling health insurance very local.

As a side note, Matt Booth from Kelsey opened the session with an anecdote about a recent visit with some network TV executives. They told him they wished they were where the Yellow Pages is today. They view Yellow Pages and Internet Yellow Pages several years ahead of where they are, because our industry has invested so much in emerging media over the last five years.