Yellowpage.com partners with AOL

The fight to keep local search marketshare is heating up

[MoneyMan]

BellSouth (BLS ) and SBC Communications (SBC ) have reached an agreement to supply Yellow Pages listings to AOL (TWX ), including its flagship U.S. online service and AOL.com portal.

Read Businessweek article. [businessweek.com]

Here are a few tid bits:

The deal could nearly double the reach of YellowPages.com

A comScore Networks survey released in April says 66% of Web surfers looking for local information use search engines rather than Internet Yellow Pages sites.

[ortelius]

I do a fair bit of seo for local clients, and I've used various IYPs, organic seo, directories, etc. In my experience, the IYPs drive a miniscule amount of traffic. I've stopped spending any money with them. I'm not sure I even trust their "visitor" counts -- I think they may be inflated. I'm not at all surprised that 66% of web traffic use the SE's for information. I'm surprised it's only 66%!
ortelius

[ebobnar]

Banding together may be the IYP's last hope of fending off the Google/Yahoo Local Search onslaught.

RealPages.com, SmartPages.com, and AOL individually couldn't do it, but maybe together they have a chance.

It's a longshot, though.

[MoneyMan]

ebobnar, I agree that the moves are defensive against the SE majors.

Despite this, we can't discount the major advantage IYPs over the SEs: A large, established sales force.

This is a large variable that is currently driving the adoption of SMEs and SE don't have it.

In a general sense, currently there are two sides of the spectrum: one is has better user adoption (SE), one has better advertiser adoption (IYP).

IMO the user adoption will ultimately trump as advertiers follow eyeballs, but the the ownership of this marketplace is far from being won by SEs.