According to a new study from the media advisory firm, Heernet Ventures, the US print and online yellow pages market should reach revenues of US$18.2 billion by 2012, . The study forecasts market growth from an estimated US$16.95 billion in 2007 to US$ 18.21 billion in 2012. While the local print market will decline by -1.5%, online yellow pages revenues will grow by 26.7%, and that doesn’t account for mobile search revenues.

Hot off the heels of Google offering free Mobile Adwords until mid November and The Kelsey Group boldly predicting mobile search to generate more than $1.4 billion in ad revenue by 2012, comes a new survey from Nielsen/NetRatings and WebVisible, which shows a whopping 92% of 2000 U.S. Internet users surveyed, felt that receiving local business ads on their cell phones would be “irritating.”

This doesn’t bode well for mobile marketers and SEO’s who are hoping to cash in on the mobile hysteria, particularly when the same survey revealed that nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users believe they are overexposed to advertising.

My friend Peter Papadimitriou at Globecraft sent me the following email he received from Google:

Dear Peter Papadimitriou,

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to
easily reach additional qualified customers who are searching
Google from their mobile phones.

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on
Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com).
We are offering this feature - and any resulting clicks - for
free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly
growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.

How about…

• adding a third of the young, upward and mobile Internet users — those aged 24-34 and with a spending power of several billions of dollars?
• adding up to an estimated 32 million Internet users for whom the Internet is a much needed life line?

You can do that…

• and make SEO virtually built into you site
• and dramatically lower your cost for all future web improvements.

No sales copy - here’s the answer

Now I’m not selling anything here so there’s no need for long, drawn-out sales copy and a “30 days money back” graphic. I’m not going to keep you on hold for the next 200 words or so but will give you the technique and the answer right away:

In a previous life, I ran a Bell project called VoiceNet (today its evolved into http://www.helloyellow.ca/) . Essentially, it was to be the first speech enabled portal of its kind anywhere completely speech enabled. When I say speech enabled, I literally mean that you communicate(d) directly with our computers … no human intervention. The goal was ultimately to speech enable the Yellow Pages to give cell phone users unprecendented access to such listing information without the paper product handy. What a great concept! Unfortunately, it was 10 years ahead of its time, and the general population just wasn’t ready.  Keep in mind, this was when search engines were in their absolute infancy, and Google was still not conceived. This was even before my days with Sympatico-Lycos … and that was quite a while ago. The project has fortunately been kept alive over the years … given its obvious potential.