There are a lot of differing opinions as to why the yellow pages industry is dying.  Everything from Google, high prices of the print ads, increased competition from the vast number of telephone directories, reduced rates in broadcast media and social media have been accuse.  While all of this has helped to create the demise of the yellow pages, a big culprit not mentioned is inefficiency while searching in the yellow pages and access of the web in today’s mobile world.

There are two main reasons searching from on a mobile device is faster than searching in the yellow pages: increased web navigation speed and confusing design of yellow page directories.

As the majority of mobile devices have transitioned to 3G or 4G cellular networks, search times have greatly decreased. Additionally, with web browsers optimized for mobile devices, and businesses designing the digital platform with mobile in mind, navigating the web from a hand held unit has never been easier than it is today.

The technological increase in search capability is juxtaposed against yellow page directories creating more niche categories in an attempt to increase revenues.  This was a fine idea at first, but when yellow page publishers began creating more detailed headings in an attempt to have advertisers list in more headings, they began laying the groundwork for confusing searches.  (This strategy would have been great if advertisers had not decided to begin moving their budget away from the yellow pages too.)  What ends up happening is the consumer searches for a doctor in the main Physician & Surgeon heading but the doctor’s information is in the Physicians & Surgeons – Family Medicine heading, or something even more ridiculous such as Physician & Surgeon –Neurology-Surgery.  This leads to a frustrated consumer who ends up abandoning the directory all together because it is no longer fast or efficient to look in the telephone directory.

With the increased access to mobile web devices and faster mobile search, telephone directories are finally the slower way to search for a simple telephone number or address of a business.  One of the big advantages a telephone directory had over online search for a long time was the amount of time it took to get to your computer, long on and then run a search.  Even the next step in web search, mobile, was not a clear cut, faster option as download speeds over cellular networks varied when available, and sometimes not an option at all.  At this point though, a person can conduct a mobile search faster than they can go to the cabinet and search through a cluttered telephone directory.