Well, we can’t say we didn't see this one coming a mile away. After years of consumers and the general public gradually migrating their phone directory searches to online sources, and seeking out businesses using popular search engines such as google, the phone book companies are finally starting to roll back their services. Phonebooks are not what they used to be, and are going extinct much like us digital folks said they would years ago.
Yellow Media, the company behind Yellow Pages and other smaller phone books, have thrown in the towel for Canpages, the company they bought only recently for $225 million. Not only has Yellow media closed up shop with Canpages, but they have drastically reduced the number of phonebooks being printed, closed several offices and let go scores of employees. Instead, the company plans to shift the majority of their business online. This comes in conjunction with reports thier print advertising revenue is in free fall mode, tumbling 15% in the last quarter alone. Unfortunately, when looking at the situation with online revenue for Yellow Media, the gains from online advertising have not made up for losses in print.
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, a valuable resource base for articles and information applicable to both new and established businesses.
This article can serve as a road map to help you get on the right track to starting your business and removing some of the stresses of entrepreneurship. Give it a read and let us know what you think.
An entrepreneur’s life can be a real roller coaster. Having started a few businesses in my career, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the hard-won experience I’ve learned throughout the process—the kind of advice I wish I’d known when I started my first, or even second, business.
Social media is the biggest thing going right now when it comes to getting your business involved in online marketing. However, it seems that there is an increasingly large number of businesses and organizations who take the wrong approach to getting involved in the whirlwind.
Often, businesses big and small, will hire young employees to manage their social media presence based solely on the notion of that generations savvy relationship with things like Facebook and Twitter.
Unfortunately, this is often the worst thing a business can do, as those socially savvy hipsters use social media for hanging out with their friends and sharing, and not for the purpose of business. If you are going to use social media for your business, then social media should be about your business - and ROI (Return on Investment) should be a sizable consideration.
Web based video is huge and growing. The online research firm comScore recently released some details on just how much video is being watched on the web, and the numbers are impressive. In the U.S. the total number of videos viewed online topped 42.6 billion, from a total of 184 million unique viewers averaging 21.1 hour each. Thats a massive amount of online video content being consumed.
Where are folks going for all this content? Well, for the most part they are going to Youtube.com, where almost half of all videos viewed are accounted for and 161 million of the unique viewers. Facebook and VEVO were nearly tied for second, with a pile of other social sites following along behind. This highlights how easily users can access online video, and how happy they are to do so. It is also important to note that these videos are being viewed and shared primarily on social networks.