This is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome back to another episode.  Whenever I see data about the number of pages that are available for printing, the trillions and trillions of pages, it means that some analyst has tried to take all the paper that’s used for printing and convert it to standard sheets and so they count everything they can and say there are umpteen trillion pages available, and then the digital printing manufacturers say, well we can get some percentage of that.  And that’s how they sort of do their projections.  And it always bothered me because of course; you’re taking some of those very long run projects that would never go to digital printing.  Like the phonebook. 

And yet, this is about to disappear.  The residential White Pages are about to disappear.  Seventeen states are at the present time working to eliminate printing this book.  Three or four have already approved it; the others are in the process.  And again, Verizon and other companies have said, why do we need this anymore.  If you want to find a phone number you can go on the internet to find it.  No one uses the printed pages.  And this was part of the regulatory system in 1934…

Remember getting the telegraph that day…

The United States created a regulated monopoly.  They gave AT&T, the Bell system, if you will, the ability to have a phone service in the United States in exchange for being regulated by the government.  That allowed us to develop one of the most advanced telecommunications systems anywhere.  You go around the world and try to use the telephone; you’d find some difficulties in some cases.  But here in the United States, you had the development of a wonderful system. 

Now, AT&T was very protective of it, you couldn’t hook a modem up to it unless you got their permission.  I remember that was the big problem when modems were coming in, remember the acoustic couplers we used in those days? 

It won’t plug into my iPad…

And we thought that 300 baud was fantastic.  Now, in exchange for that, the phone company had to provide the phonebook so that they wouldn’t have to have, you know, thousands and thousands of telephone operators looking for phone numbers.  Well now, this has become vestigial.  Now how many of these are there?  Well, it’s about 17,000 tons of paper.  That’s trillions and trillions of pages. 

That’s a lot of paper airplanes!

So all those analysts who look at all the gigantic number of pages that are out there are going to find now that that number is being diminished very quickly; that the percentage available for digital printing, if you do it that way, becomes less.  I contend that the real growth in digital printing will be in new work, work that was not created before, and that’s very hard for the analysts that are out there. 

Now, the Yellow Pages are a different story.  The Yellow Pages are promotional in nature.  But here again, the phone companies and the independent organizations are killing themselves.  There’s not a single year, if you advertise in any of the Yellow Pages, there’s not a single year where your cost goes down.  Every year the price of that ad goes up.  And so you may start out with a gigantic ad that takes up an entire page, and then go for a bigger display ad, and then what happens is, unless you are growing at the same time, you start cutting back and cutting back to where you only take the little bold listing that you get for nothing. 

At one point they went from Yellow Pages paper, where the paper was yellow to printing in color, which meant the paper was white and then they put the yellow over it.  And then if you wanted white, they charged you a premium for that.  I said, wait a minute guys, there’s no ink there, there’s no yellow, so you save money.  So why are you charging me more.  It’s like the bold listing they charge you more for a bold listing and it’s like one keystroke to do that. 

So over time, you’ve had competitive Yellow Pages and you’ve had the phone companies themselves dividing up cities, like Boston used to have one, now they have three phonebooks that cover the entire city.  So if you are a retail organization that covers that territory then you’ve got to have ads in all three of those publications.  So these guys are really putting themselves out of business, they’re pricing themselves to the point where the retail operation can’t afford them anymore. 

And so taking an ad and Google or doing a word search or something local is going to be the way that the people find you.  Buyers are going to go to the web to find you.  So, these guys have to get their act together.  If they want to keep the printed version of this and make money from all of these ads, they better come up with a new economic model that’s more open to the advertiser.  But over time, the big projects that we print start to change and many of the companies in this industry just don’t understand that.  They think that everything will continue the way it was and I’m old enough to tell you that that is not the way it is anymore. 

Frank:  1 Phonebook: 0

The world has changed and we have to change with it.  The opportunities out there are not in traditional print markets, they are in new print markets and that is the challenge.  Finding them, developing them, and then using them properly.  In any case, that’s my opinion. 

Next Time…

A little nostalgia today, if you will, for the way the world used to be…