by Brokenbat

I can remember the last time I used the yellow pages, I was dismantling a dressing table and needed somewhere to temporarily place the mirror. That was back about five years ago.

What I can’t remember however is the last time I used the yellow pages to actually look up the number to somewhere.

I have a feeling many Australian’s are like me and simply can’t remember when they had the need to access a paper version of the telephone directory. A recent study by Coredata seems to confirm this.

MORE than half of Australians would stop having the Yellow Pages delivered if given the choice, according to a survey and almost four in five Australians believe Yellow Pages should ask consumers if they wanted the printed telephone directory.

The company surveyed more than 1000 Australians in May this year, with results showing one-third of people aged under 29 never used the printed version of Yellow Pages.

The survey revealed 58 per cent of Australians would stop having the Yellow Pages delivered if given the choice, as 62 per cent believe it has a negative environmental impact.


Currently as far as I know there is no way to opt out of the Yellow Pages delivery. I live in a block of flats and every so often notice a big stack of them sitting outside near our front door. I (and seemingly everyone else) just ignores them and after a few weeks they magically disappear.

Presumably someone takes them out to recycling bin and turfs them.

I’d do it but I seem to be the designated bin putter outterer for this building by default but that’s a whole other story. I could write a an entire separate post alone on how lazy some people living in flats can be.

This trend of straight into the ‘recycling bin’ seems to be more quite popular with “the survey showing two million Yellow Pages were thrown straight into household recycling bins each year.”

Back in 2008 the Yellow Pages had an estimated circulation of 5 million so this is almost 50% of wasted paper. If you’ve seen the Yellow Pages you know it’s not just a few sheets of A4 either, it’s about 2-3 inches thick at least.

Although that thickness doesn’t discourage some people from coming up with interesting things to do with them:

Curious sidenote: The preview image for this video looks sucpiciously like a vagina. It’s not just me right?


I guess you don’t just have to rely solely on the escort listings to meet girls now, just tuck a copy of the Yellow Pages into your jacket before a date and whip it out if things go south.

Yellow Pages insist that 26 million searches are still made monthly using the print directory and that 92% of lookups are for businesses with 70% of those calls winding up in purchases. How you research such numbers

Either way advertisers are buying into it and now we come to the real reason we’re still getting the print version delivered;

Telstra’s Yellow Pages publisher Sensis has hit back at claims “print is dead” after achieving solid revenue growth from its print directories.

The directory publisher’s print revenue grew by 5.4 per cent last financial year, with Yellow Pages earnings up 3.7 per cent and White Pages up 10.8 per cent, and is forecast to increase at a similar rate this year.


That was back in December 2008. With the way things are economy wise if Sensis can achieve advertising growth this year then I don’t think we’ll see the directory going anywhere anytime soon.

If their print advertising is booming then presumably so is their online division too. Although to be honest I don’t use it that often either. Anyone who’s used Yellow Pages online will be able to relate to the annoyance that is pages of paid rankings for businesses that ‘service all areas’ but are actually 300km from where you live.

Let’s face it anyone who isn’t poor or elderly doesn’t waste time with paper directories anymore. We could solve the poor problem by just handing out Centrelink flyers with their phone numbers printed with dole forms.

As for the lonely elderly who’ve got nothing better to do well that’s probably going to be a bit more difficult. Surely going down to the local RSL to make some new friends is cheaper then ringing random business up and buying stuff just to have a conversation with someone? Well, so long as you avoid the pokies anyway.

When was the last time you used a printed phone directory?


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