The Yellow Pages – innovation, history and why it’s relevant today!
This blog has been inspired by the current state of social media (February 2025). A time when the world feels very unbalanced, with people out of control and the general sense of hope is dwindling as hate is thriving. It’s not great and it’s led to us making a big change, which we’ll get to in the second part of this blog.
How the Yellow Pages began
Let’s start at the beginning, the Yellow Pages wouldn’t exist without Alexander Graham Bell and his vision to create a telephonic device. There’s no denying that Bell had big ambitions, though I doubt he (or anyone at the time) could have envisaged just how big a moment this would be. It was the beginning of a system that is at the heart of practically every form of digital communication that we use today.
Bell Systems as the company became known was a continental conglomerate with a total monopoly on telecommunication in the USA and Canada. Bell’s idea had captured peoples imagination and people around the world embraced this technology very quickly.
Of course there were teething problems, one of the most significant being the need to organise the telephone network. It’s believed that the New Haven Telephone Company was one of the first regions to hit capacity, facing issues from the volume of people wanting to use its services. The solution, at the time, was to publish a little white card with the names of all 50 subscribers. The card had headings, divided into four sections - residential, professional, miscellaneous and essential services. This is recognised as being the first “telephone book”.
These early directories only listed names, numbers were not needed because operators made the connections for each caller by hand. Then in 1886, Reuben H. Donnelley established the first classified telephone directory advertising company, this was the beginning of an entire industry, and a product that became known as the Yellow Pages.
Why yellow?
I’ll be honest, it’s far from clear and the web is full of speculation. Popular opinion claims that in 1833, that the printer ran out of white paper and rather than wait weeks for a new shipment, they used yellow.
Decades of scientific research has concluded that the combination of black text on yellow paper is the easiest to read for most people, which is fascinating, given that books and many ‘digital’ devices follow the black on white path.
The creation of another new industry
Deregulation and competition created lower prices, with multiple companies creating directories. By the late 1980’s (peak usage, pre internet) it was estimated there were over 2,300 independent yellow page type directories produced by 250 publishers in the USA!
When did the British Yellow Pages start?
The British Yellow Pages began life in Brighton, published by the General Post Office (GPO) in 1966. This was a combination of residential and commercial listings, the resi’ being produced on white paper and the commercial on yellow, following the style established in the US. The idea of a regional book containing contact numbers and ads for commercial services was quickly adopted across the country. Both the telephone book and the Yellow Pages became the way to find the people and services you needed.
Such was the success of the Yellow Pages it broke away, creating a purely commercial listing. As the directory’s presence grew and the potential increased, bigger organisations became involved, with BT owning the Yellow Pages in 1984, producing over 70 editions across the country.
The creation of an iconic ad
The Yellow Pages was big business, with major TV campaigns, one of which has remained ever-green for many people. The ad tells the story of an elderly man searching numerous shops for a book – Fly Fishing by JR Hartley. He simply cannot find it anywhere when his daughter hands him the Yellow Pages and he discovers a shop with a copy. The charm of the ad comes right at the end, when the man is asked for his name, for the book reservation and he proudly declares he is JR Hartley, the books author.
Side bar - Such was the success of the advert that, eight years after its release, author Michael Russell ghostwrote Fly Fishing: Memories of Angling Days under the name JR Hartley. The book had two follow-ups, while the original became one of the most sought-after out-of-print books in the world.
When Norman Lumsden (who portrayed JR Hartley) passed away in 2001, the advert was rebroadcast again in his honour and his legacy lives on today.
Boom time
Throughout the 80’s and 90’s, these big – A4 page size and chunky, about 40mm thick - yellow books were found close to just about every phone, in every home and business. They had a lot of presence, first was the colour, they were pretty much unmissable, wherever they were stored. And because they were weighty, they were used in all sorts of unexpected ways, from door stops to coasters, so you’d find them everywhere.
• At its peak, over 28 million copies were distributed across the UK
• From start to finish, almost 1 billion copies were produced
• Just short of 1 trillion pages were used (enough to get to Mars and back three times!)
Time for change
When the internet was launched in 1996, the way people would search for information, information of any kind, changed. The Yellow Pages did follow the online trend and became digital but by 2017, Yell (owners of the brand) announced that the Yellow Pages would be winding down. This was clearly a difficult decision, but one that reflected the change in peoples behaviour.
The Yellow pages kept going in print for a few more years before becoming entirely digital. It still operates today, with various digital services, but it is pale compared to the significance of Google, Bing and other web search facilities.
Why is it (the Yellow Pages) relevant today?
Clearly I’m showing my age, there will be many people for whom the idea of a directory that you manually search through feels completely alien, stick with me, there’s some good solid human insights that I believe are as important as ever today.
The original Yellow Pages was a free listing, long before it was commercialised, it was created to solve a problem, with advertising space being added to cover the cost of production. There was a very clear boundary in place, you knew exactly what you were getting when you picked up the book. There was no ambiguity about it, this was functional, paid for advertising that almost everyone had access to.
Today, the vast majority of social media channels are just like the Yellow Pages. Free to be part of and packed with advertising. But it wasn’t always this way. The channels started life being about people and community, in fact there was even some moderation and light touch policing of the content.
Looking at most of the channels in 2025 there is no community left. 99% of the people that were using these functions have left, fed up with the barrage of ads, toxicity and questionable ethics. The 1% that remain are found within closed groups and often only ‘stay’ for these groups as it can be difficult to move them elsewhere.
It’s time for change
The social media moguls will not like this paragraph either because they have been making huge amounts of money from their platforms for years in full knowledge that most of the money spent by advertisers is wasted – for many reasons including bots, lack of education about the platform/audience and general exploitation of peoples naivety.
Will any of them make the effort to bring back the values upon which they were founded? Sadly, it appears not. They are only interested in making ‘more money’.
Could someone new bring the much needed upheaval? I hope so, there are a number of people trying to get back to the values of people and communities. The web has the ability to connect people like never before, in the same way the telephone revolutionised the world, but this stuff isn’t free, someone always has to pay.
For the past two decades it’s been all about free-ware, no cost entry and free access, just like the original Yellow Pages. In the same way that the Yellow Pages is irrelevant today, these social media channels are becoming irrelevant too.
Old or new?
It’s easy to get nostalgic about things, and many brands do this to great effect. The greatest strength about the pre-internet services was the transparency – what you saw - a physical directory, was clear about what it did, how it functioned and people could make informed decisions about whether that was or wasn’t for them.
Today it’s much less clear, especially in the digital world, where I’d say it has been deliberately built to be opaque. I hope that the new community focused, people centred platforms have great success, we need them to, I don’t deny that for a second. What we’ve got right now is not fit for purpose. The damage they are doing is significant and people appear to be sleep walking through it.
Pause and reflect
It’s time to slow down, take a breath, connect with nature and the people around us. We have decided to scale back our content. TBH we’ve only ever tried to share things that we felt would be of benefit and interest to our customers, but from here on, until such time as we feel confident that things have changed, or a new channel has proved itself to be genuinely ‘for the people’ we are stepping back, detoxing.
What we will do
We’re still an online company, that’s not going to change. But we’re putting our energy into the emails that people have said they want to receive from us. We’ll be spending more time on the phone with customers, talking about where we can help and what support they need. We’ll be at events, sharing our ideas and exploring other peoples ideas and interpretations.
We think that this feels human, actions and activities that we’re comfortable with. They are clearly defined and removed from the spaces we simply find toxic these days. BTW it's not just us, check these from Reddit, Medium and Forbes (the article is a few years old, but still resonates). We hope that this information resonates with you too, if this chimes with you, here’s a link to our newsletter subscription. To be clear, we WON’T be emailing you multiple times a week this week or any other week. Our plan is to keep things regular, probably monthly, possibly bi-monthly and we’re really interested to go back to print, hand-written letters and flyers for the things that we know are of interest to you.
We really want to see more smiley faces in real-life and feel we will be less jaded by the social media pollution – both the physical and environmental pollution, did you know that the carbon footprint of all that social noise is massive! Sorry no Yellow shirt at the moment…though we feel that there’s definitely an emoji themed design to be done at some point in the future. Thanks for reading.