You would have to be hiding under a rock not to hear the daily talk of the print Yellow Pages dying but you do not hear as much about the White Pages, typically because they are free and not as business focused so when there is not as much money changing hands people do not talk about it as much.

But as you can imagine the usage of the white pages has dropped drastically as well, for a couple main reasons:

  • Mobile phone growth and applications
  • People searching online for people rather than picking up the book

Although the second one is obvious and the first one is as well for the most part, I think the part that many people miss is that since the majority of cell phone numbers are unlisted you will not find them anywhere, online or off.

Well, AT&T has figured this out and without much fanfare has killed the publishing of the White Pages sections in many phone books.

State commissions typically only make it a requirement for the phone companies to make the directory listings available NOT actually requiring the printing of them, unless required.

So what happened when they did this?

A couple quick points of reference, in Milwaukee, where this was first tested in September of last year there was a less than 2 percent request rate to actually get a copy, LESS THAN 2 PERCENT. If that is not a statistic to take note of I am not sure what is.

In Austin and Atlanta the request rate was 3 percent. Think about that a bit, the delivery rate before was 100 percent, but only 3 percent actually wanted them. Waste much????

To read a bit more about this check out Madison.com