Superpages.com Growing Slowly
Don’t Cry for Me Yahoo. One of the different aspects of the recent rise of online advertising is that the gains have been relatively concentrated in search based means.
Folks like CNET and iVillage haven’t grown that strongly compared to firms like Google. The riches have been concentrated amongst a relative few.
Performance of the online divisions of newspapers have masked a simple fact: most of the gains they have posted have been through their classifieds properties and not their flagship web sites with rich media banners.
That makes sense because classifieds are essentially three category search sites (real estate, automotive and recruitment).
But I was surprised to see, while sifting through Verizon’s earnings release for Q2, that “In the second quarter, VIS’ domestic online directory and search service, SuperPages.com, achieved revenue growth of 12.2 percent compared with the second quarter of 2005, and Internet yellow pages searches increased 143.9 percent over the same period.”
12 percent is pathetic compared to the growth of other search based firms, especially in the face of such impressive query growth. Superpages.com advertisers do not pay on a performance basis for the main part so query growth is not as tied to revenue as it is at other firms like Google.
In the face of the Yahoo postulation, it is interesting that a pure search based business like Superpages.com is also struggling for quality growth.
