Looking at mobile local search advertising, the Kelsey Group thinks it will be heading toward somewhere around $1.3 billion in the next four years in the US alone.

"As mobile data consumption rises, we expect local marketing to be a big winner," says Michael Boland, program director, Mobile Local Media with The Kelsey Group. "There is a strong correlation between local search and the mobile use case, which will cause a good portion of the ongoing mobile application boom to focus on local."

A few other interesting findings cited in a report from the Kelsey Group include:

- The percentage of mobile searches that have local intent will increase from 28% in 2008 to 35% in 2013.
      
- Currently there are 54.5 million mobile Internet users in the United States, representing 25 percent of online users.
      
- Approximately 15% of iPhone applications are local.

These are some interesting numbers to consider, particularly if you look to market your business to a local audience. In a related story, mobile search usage has jumped 14% in a year’s time (between ’07 and ’08)according to ABI Research.

quoted today

saying that the erosion in usage of print yellow pages is likely to fall off at a higher rate this year — by 10% this year, compared with only 2% to 3% erosion in recent years.

They state that a combination of factors such as more users going to internet yellow pages and local search engines combined with a recession are propelling the rapid erosion. Concerningly, one can extrapolate that if print YP usage is dropping, advertiser dollars might also follow the herd.

As Greg Sterling points out, The Kelsey Group has historically been a very staunch defender of the print YP industry, so this article is a bit of a gut-punch to people in the legacy print business, even though anyone watching the trends over the last few years won’t find it all that surprising.

One thing the Media Post article doesn’t mention is how a number of smaller, regional print yellow pages companies have had surprising growth in ad sales over the past year, likely at the expense of the larger yellow pages directory sales. As Greg further points out, some of the smaller, nimble companies like ReachLocal (who are frenemies with the yellow pages industry) may be poised to take over the small business advertiser base as those companies’ agencies of choice if the yellow pages industry cannot retain them. Yellow pages has held a home court advantage with small businesses for a long time, but there are a lot of hungry wolves nipping at their heels, and they will need to retain their advertisers while transitioning them over from print to online advertising in order to retain revenue over the long term.

I’ve suggested before that the concept of “yellow pages” itself might also be endangered in its online incarnation, since specialized directories and local search engines may now be obscuring the need for “traditional” yellow pages websites in the eyes of consumers. Indeed, I see a new generation of young consumers who barely seem to know what “yellow pages” is, and this could explain why fewer and fewer people seem to be trying to find yellow pages in Google:

(click to enlarge)

So, yellow pages companies have some multi-fold challenges to face. They must strive to transform themselves from being only print yellow pages into being a liked/trusted agency that small businesses perceive are vital/useful for getting their ads into multiple sites throughout the internet, and they simultaneously need to transform their traditional yellow pages directory websites into local information portals with broader appeal and compelling stickiness to attract and retain the newer generation of users.

The bigger yellow pages companies are aware of all this, and are not to be counted out of fight yet. Unlike the newspaper industry which has been a little late in adapting to the internet paradigm, yellow pages are adapting themselves to protect their competitiveness in the market, and the analyst warnings are only intensifying their attention and resolve.

Comments

Since the Kelsey Group services the Yellow Pages, one of their predictions is about the Yellow Pages print version. Rather than putting money there, they predict that they’ll print and distribute less books. They’ll shift to the Internet, sometimes exclusively, to reduce costs.

“We believe the next downturn will favor media choices that are more flexible and provide a lower cost per lead than print directories, which would signal a profound shift.”
– Charles Laughlin, senior vice president and program director, The Kelsey Report® and managing editor, The Kelsey Group.

Other predictions see more growth in the auto and real estate industries online. They also predict more search through “specialized devices” (like cell phones?).

Here are some of the predictions from the Interactive Local Media analyst team:

• More options for SEO and SEM. There will be many new start-ups focused on the auto and real estate markets. They expect MLS listings on non-Realtor.com sites.
• Local advertisers will continue to use the rise of online marketing to spend less on advertising, so local search costs will go down.
• Adding more video, mobile and outdoor advertising.

Although the headline talks about new media, there weren’t a lot of details. Read the press release here.

Comments

Calacanis has become something of a lightning rod with his opinions on SEO. He even managed to provoke this reaction from Danny Sullivan back in August:

Want to be like Robert — and Jason Calacanis — and keep equating SEO with spam? Then fuck off.

I don’t think I’ve ever used the F-word in any of my writing, and my apologies for being so crass. But I’ve had enough of people trying to advance their own personal agendas (Jason hoping someone will care about Mahalo; Robert hoping someone will watch his videos) on the back of an industry that is full of plenty of people who do good work.

Krasilovsky justified the invitation in his comment response on the Sphinn story, saying, “if Jason can invite his harshest critics to debate him on his own blog — and they all seemed to have come and participated — why can’t we invite Jason to speak to our audience?”

But no one is telling Krasilovsky what he can and can’t do; as far as we know he can invite whatever personal pals he likes to chat. Calacanis should be something of a draw in the way Rush Limbaugh is today to people who don’t share his views.

If that gets a few more people to attend, that works out well for the Kelsey Group. Conferences are a business first, and stirring up interest ahead of the conference by inviting Calacanis looks like a good decision right now.