The White Pages in Australia are being updated now. The publisher, Sensis, appears to think that the Internet can make them insanely rich — the cost of a listing including an email address and web site address is over $600 per year! That’s 10 times the cost of a phone number listing, and I didn’t even ask how much extra it would cost to have the listing printed in bold print.
Bear in mind that the person who looks up your phone number in the directory is already committed to contacting you. Therefore, the added value of the additional contact information has to be very close to *zero*.
The profit margin on these listing must be approaching infinity. It would be interesting to know how many small businesses are suckered into this rip-off. Unfortunately the White Pages web site doesn’t even have details of the cost of listings, let alone any statistics.
To put this in context, a small business can buy 200,000 targeted visitors to its web site for about $600
