Yellow Pages
The Yellow Pages will cease printing in January 2019. After 51 years, the once-essential print publication of a domestic telephone directory is discontinued as owner Yell entirely digitizes its company.
The Yellow Pages will cease publication in January 2019, the Yellow Pages' owner, Yell, stated. Yell has decided to completely digitize the business, bringing an end to the publication's 51-year history. The first of the 104 final editions will be given in Kingston in January of 2018, and the last will be sent to Brighton, where the book was first published in 1966, a year later.
An initial printing of Pears' Cyclopedia After 125 years in print, Pears' Cyclopaedia has reached its final chapter. Read further Yell will produce 23 million copies of the final edition, which it hopes will become a collectible.
Richard Hanscott, CEO of Yell, stated, "After 51 years of production, Yellow Pages has become a household name, and we're delighted to announce that we still have clients from the very first Yellow Pages edition in 1966. How many brands can claim to have clients for more than 50 years?"
The journal gained notoriety for its commercials, such as the 1980s "JR Hartley" campaign and the "French Polisher." The emergence of social media and Google have diminished the market for printed directories, which were once essential for locating service providers and professionals.
Yell, a subsidiary of Hibu Group, intends to "assist a million businesses be found, chosen, and trusted by more online customers by 2020." Instead of the Yellow Pages, Yell will provide free listings on yell.com to companies. "Like many businesses, Yell has discovered that digital success requires ongoing change and innovation," stated Hanscott. We are well positioned to continue assisting local businesses and customers in achieving online success, both now and in the future.
In recent years, the directory has prompted environmental concerns, resulting in the 2009 creation of the Say No to Phonebooks movement, which called for a "opt-in" system in which only individuals who request these directories would have them delivered to their door.
The Yell Group, the Yellow Pages manufacturer at the time, said it was "among the most sustainable enterprises in the world" and that its directories were manufactured in an environmentally responsible manner and were 100 percent recyclable. We, like other members of the Data Publishers Association, maintain an opt-out program that allows consumers to choose not to get a directory."
In 1883, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a printer manufacturing a directory ran out of white paper and substituted yellow instead, resulting in the Yellow Pages telephone directory. Three years later, the first Yellow Pages magazine was created. In 1966, the Post Office in the United Kingdom introduced the directory, which ultimately became part of British Telecom.
The Business Pages was founded in the mid-1980s after Margaret Thatcher's conservative government privatized British Telecom, gaining popularity through a series of humorous advertisements. Alongside Talking Pages, the organization launched the first electronic distribution of classified directory content in 1987.
With the emergence of the Internet, Yell established yell.co.uk in 1996, and a year later, the site began allowing transactions. In 2001, BT sold the Yellow Pages to private equity firms for £2.1 billion, later creating a new telephone service and boosting the total number of Yellow Pages to 102.