Yahoo! Local Teleseminar

Wednesday, August 2 at 11:30 AM Pacific Time

Small Business Commandos is hosting an exclusive tele-seminar on

Insider Secrets to Successful Local Online Marketing.

Paul Levine, General Manager of Yahoo! Local will be on the hot seat answering your questions.

Yahoo! is sponsoring the event and is paying for the first 300 participants. Additional participants are $39 each.

Sign up now before all the seats are filled. In the first 20 minutes after announcing the event, more than 180 of the seats are taken.

Read more at http://ypcommando.com/yahoo.html

Where would you find Barbarians in the Yellow Pages?

New York buyout firm KKR (the company made famous in the book/film "Barbarians at the Gate" is said to be in negotiations to buy PagesJaunes, the French Yellow Pages.

PagesJaunes, loosely translated means "big honkin' cash flow from old media."

Dang, Yellow Pages is one sexy business.

Verizon Buys Inceptor

Verizon acquired Inceptor, an Efficient Frontier competitor that specializes in bid management software for placing ads on Google and Yahoo.

This marks a significant move for Verizon that they want to expand their capabilities to distribute their advertisers across multiple search properties.

Once again, Verizon is leading the charge in the US in terms of greatly expanding the service offerings of their online product.

Three cheers for Eric Chandler, and the Verizon team for taking action. Print is certainly on its way out, and the Superpages team isn't waiting around to be a casualty.

Verizon Directories, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications, said on Friday that it has acquired the assets of Inceptor, a search engine technology company.

Verizon said the deal would bolster its Internet yellow-pages business, SuperPages.com. Verizon said in December that it would sell or spin off its directories unit as it focuses on its wireless, high-speed data and corporate customers.

Verizon Class-Action Questions

I received the following message from the owner of an insurance agency in Cincinnati who is outraged at Verizon's decision to pull out of the market.

He's looking to join forces with other disgruntled advertisers.

So who's to blame when a directory publisher abandons a market?

As the Internet continues drawing the local users away from print, there are likely to be more directories dropped in the future.

Original note:
Dick, I found your blog and was quite interested. I run a small business in Cincinnati and am one of many who were swindled by Verizon. I placed a full page ad in the Insurance category of both the Cincinnati and one of the county directory pages. I am currently in litigation with them. Do you know of any others in the same position, or of any class action attempts from the pull out of markets by Verizon?

If you know of anyone who feels similarly burned, please contact me and I will put you in touch with the folks in Cincinnati.