The global directory publisher Yell Group has succeeded in its effort to convince lenders to go along with a plan to raise 500 million pounds through a rights issue and restructure its 3.8 billion pound debt load. Debt restructuring has become an increasingly urgent concern for Yell as the year has progressed and results in many of its key properties sagged under the weight of a global economic slowdown. Easing the debt burden has been a particular focus of company Chairman Bob Wigley, a former Merrill Lynch banker who assumed the post in June.

According to Bloomberg, the deal with creditors calls for extending maturity of its loans to 2014 and reducing borrowing by 300 million pounds.

Yell Group is the leading directory publisher in the U.K. and also owns Yellowbook, the leading U.S. independent publisher. Yell also operates Yell Publicidad, with market leadership positions in Spain and in the South American markets of Argentina, Chile and Peru.

Many global directory publishers have made deleveraging a priority this year, as investors and lenders grow increasingly skittish over high debt-EBITDA ratios on businesses with declining core revenues. The Swedish publisher Eniro, for example, conducted a rights issue earlier this year that raised 2.4 billion Swedish krona to reduce that company’s debt. At the end of Q3, Eniro’s leverage ratio was reduced from 4.8X at the start of the year to 3.6X, with a total indebtedness of 7.1 billion krona.

The Swedish directory publisher Eniro has passed a key financial milestone, according to its third-quarter and year-to-date earnings report, released this week. Through nine months of 2009, online revenues surpassed offline (print revenues), making Eniro a majority online directory business (excluding revenues from its directory assistance operation, and a plurality with voice included).

Eniro operates in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Poland. Its Norway operation has been majority online for a while, but this is the first time that online was the largest revenue component at a group level.

Through nine months, Eniro generated offline revenues of SEK 1,885 million, and online revenues of SEK 1,931 million. Voice (DA) revenues total SEK 799 million. Excluding voice, online accounts for 50.6 percent of revenues. Including voice, online represents a plurality of revenues at 41.8 percent, with print making up 40.8 percent and voice 17.3 percent. One U.S. dollar is roughly equal to seven SEK.

The Kelsey Report will summarize Eniro financial results in an upcoming Client Inquiry Brief.

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.

JD Power Roundtable: Social Media Key for Ford

All accounts from last week’s JD Power’s Automotive Roundtable in Las Vegas suggest that Ford Group VP Jim Farley laid out a really compelling picture of how a major manufacturer looks at its opportunities in digital and especially social media. (read more…)

Real-Time Search, Part II: Local

In the previous post, I promised to address the local angle of yesterday’s blitz of search engine/ social media deals. Many of the concepts apply to local: We’ve looked at a few examples in the past such as the efforts of Praized Media to marry local search with Twitter-like feeds. (read more…)

Real-Time Search: Now It’s On

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock today, you’ve heard about the deal between Google and Twitter and that between Bing and Twitter and Facebook (I know, it’s confusing). Essentially these deals boil down to Google and Bing getting access to Twitter’s (and Facebook’s in Bing’s case) feed of real-time status updates. These will be displayed alongside traditional results in some way that will likely evolve over time. (read more…)

Ex-Chicago Trib Staffers to Provide Chicago Content for NY Times

Local news blogs may have trouble making their economics work. But what if their content can be picked up and paid for by major media outlets? That’s the model behind the Chicago News Cooperative (CNC), a new organization of former Chicago Tribune staffers. (read more…)

Association Merger Agreement Finalized

The long-awaited merger agreement between the Yellow Pages Association (representing publishers) and the Association of Directory Marketing (representing Yellow Pages ad agencies, or CMRs) has been approved by the groups’ respective boards. Now the deal faces membership approval, which appears all but certain before the end of November. (read more…)

Cablevision’s Newsday Goes Behind the Firewall

Cablevision has made good on its threat to put the online version of Newsday behind a firewall, accessible only by print subscribers or online-only users willing to pay $5 per week. Classifieds will remain free. (read more…)

Poynting the Way: A Conversation With Multiplied Media

Today I had the chance to talk to Multiplied Media, the company behind the fast moving Poynt mobile search product. In the past year, it has planted its stakes as the most popular mobile local search app for BlackBerries. (read more…)

Mary Meeker: Mobile Will Save Our Souls (and Much Love for iPhone)

Morgan Stanley Managing Director Mary Meeker gave her annual brain dump to the Web 2.0 Summit yesterday, painting a picture of a mobile-centric media world on the horizon. At the heart of her argument was the contention that location (mobile device’s inherent portability and location awareness) will drive much of this innovation and value. (read more…)

BIA/Kelsey Research: 9% of SMBs Using Twitter

A BIA/Kelsey press release today reveals data from Local Commerce Monitor, indicating that 9 percent of small businesses use Twitter to market themselves. Thirty-two percent of SMBs meanwhile intend to use social media in their marketing in the next 12 months. (read more…)

Apple Earnings Rise on Strong iPhone Sales

Apple announced fourth-quarter earnings today with profits of $1.67 billion ($1.82 per diluted share). This is up 47 percent year over year from $1.14 billion ($1.26 per share), beating analyst expectations of $1.60 per share. (read more…)

Motorists in Melbourne, Australia, can now navigate their city in 3-D using the Whereis navigation system, produced by Sensis, Australia’s leading directories publisher. Whereis is rolling out 3-D city models this week. The product focuses on Melbourne’s central business district.

While different in several important aspects, this product brings to mind the broader emerging category of immersive experiences in directory and mapping applications. (The differences include in-car device versus online, 3-D versus actual photos, navigation versus local business search.)

We’ve seen directory publishers, including European Directories, launch street level navigation experiences in their IYPs using actual photos and the ability to pan 360 degrees. Of course Google has street view (where I was able to virtually drive to the front door of my house — a bizarre experience), and in Canada, Canpages has launched its own street level experience.

Everyscape offers technology that media companies can use to build their own immersive directory products.

It Italy, Seat SpA was a bit ahead of its time with its Visual product. But now, as consumers are trained to expect street views and satellite photos, perhaps they will embrace a similar experience in local search, assuming the process is seamless and it adds real value to the search result.

European Directories SA has named Ben Legg as its new chief operating officer. Legg comes to EDSA from Google, where he was COO of European operations. EDSA is a major directory player in Europe, with market leadership positions in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Slovakia, and strong competitive positions in Poland and Sweden.

The announcement would appear to be a coup for EDSA, luring a high-profile exec from Europe’s dominant search player. EDSA, like others in the space, is busy transforming itself into a lead generation rather than a directory company. No doubt Legg’s experience at Google will help in this transition.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Legg joined Google in January 2007 as director of operations. Prior to Google, Legg spent several years with Coca-Cola bottlers in Greece and India. He began his career in 1999 at McKinsey, where he worked until 2002, and before that, he spent 10 years in the British Army as an engineering officer. He is a civil engineering graduate of Cranfield University.

From the department of transparent marketing ploys comes an effort by 192.com, a UK Internet directory service, demanding an opt-in regime for phone book distribution in Britain.

This is neither a unique nor an indefensible position. Many environmental groups around the world are actively pushing for various flavors of opt-in or opt-out programs to reduce the number of unwanted phone books. And BIA/Kelsey believes the industry needs to embrace opt-out programs because it’s the right thing to do and it might help stave off a more severe consumer/environmentalist backlash. But when a competitor to the phone book takes up this mantle, it takes on an aura of self-serving shamelessness that diminishes what might otherwise be a useful debate.

The main unnamed target of the 192.com campaign is Yell, the leading print directories publisher and also a key player in  IYP, the field that 192.com wants to play in.

For a little color, see this article in The Sun, one of Britain’s more exuberant tabloids.

The Nordics directory publisher Eniro last week announced a reorganization to a “more rational corporate structure.” The new plan divides the business into three functions that cut across all the company’s national operating units — Products and Services, Operations and Sales. Previously, these functions were managed from within each of Eniro’s country-level units. Eniro operates in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Poland.

The reorganization appears to end a structure created by previous CEO Tomas Franzén that divided print and online operations and sales into two distinct operations. In an interview with BIA/Kelsey in February, Eniro CEO Jesper Karrbrink suggested Eniro may move away from the dedicated print and online approach in favor of a blended model that Karrbrink acknowledged would be more efficient and more in keeping with a multiproduct strategy.

A key element of the reorganization is naming Peter Kusendahl senior vice president of sales, with group responsibility. Sales leadership had previously been pushed down to the country level. Kusendahl had previously been in charge of all “offline” or print operations. He is the executive most responsible for the success of Din Del, Eniro’s Swedish local directories operation.

Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.

NPR Gets $3 Million for Local Initiative

NPR will work with a pilot group of a dozen NPR stations to create multimedia local news that will work online and on radio, thanks to new grants from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting ($2 million) and $1 million from the Knight Foundation. (read more…)

Yellow Pages and SMB Odds and Ends

For a bit of insight on how small businesses in a meat and potatoes category (Tire Dealers) view the evolution of their ad spend, see this article from TireBusiness.com (I only get it for the articles). One observation is how little performance measurement enters into the discussion of where to invest ad dollars. (read more…)

Pay-Per-Call Transparency: A Conversation With Yext

I’m slowly getting around to catching up with all of the local search companies that received accolades at the TechCrunch50 show earlier this month. Rounding out the list is Yext, a company that characterizes itself as a “pay per action” provider. (read more…)

Aloqa Launches API, Lowers Barriers for Mobile Publishers

In our last writeup on Aloqa, one of the features highlighted was the ability for businesses to create a branded “channel” within the Aloqa app. The benefit here is that it’s much cheaper than building your own iPhone app and could even get found easier, given the increasing amount of noise (85,000 apps) in Apple’s App Store. (read more…)

Dinan: PPC Will Dominate but Coexist With Subscription Pricing

Caught up with Bill Dinan after our Directional Media Strategies event last week, where he sat on a panel that I moderated called “Fixing the Yellow Pages Business Model.” Much of the session content centered around pay-per-call models. (read more…)

San Diego Hyperlocal Site Launches ‘U.S. Local News Network’

The San Diego News Network announced ambitious plans to expand its template for local news, sports, events, lifestyle and entertainment, to 40 North American cities in the next 30 months. The company, renamed  The U.S. Local News Network, already has sites in San Diego and the southwest portion of adjacent Riverside County. It is set to launch in Orange County before the end of the year. The company has raised close to $2 million. (read more…)

Facebook’s Tim Kendall: What Works in Social Advertising

Facebook is tweaking its approach to advertising, given the realities of what’s effective in social media, according to Facebook Director of Monetization Tim Kendall, who was speaking at TargusInfo’s Online Lead Quality Summit last week in Las Vegas. The problem is people who are visiting social networks are not explicitly in “consideration mode,” he noted. (read more…)

Can Pandora Be a Local Play?

I missed this until now but Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch has an interesting post on Internet radio business models. This is told through the story of Pandora, which had a few brushes with fatality, since being alleviated by grassroots action, funding and a favorable RIAA settlement. (read more…)

Bookshelf: Stibel’s ‘Wired for Thought’

There has been kind of a disconnect for me in former Web.com head Jeff Stibel’s twin identities as a top local executive, and as a brain scientist. Not anymore. In a provocative and valuable new book, “Wired for Thought,” Stibel lays out a solid case that the development of the Internet parallels the development of the human brain — only the Internet doesn’t suffer from poor memory and slow processing speeds. (read more…)

One Newspaper’s Revenue Strategy: Hard-Core Focus on Local, Print

Newspapers can still win with a hardcore community focus in their journalism and advertising, and a renewed emphasis on print. Or at least, that’s s the message delivered by Ed Moss, the newly installed publisher of The San Diego Union-Tribune, which was sold a few months ago at a fire-sale price to Platinum Equity, a buyer of troubled properties. (read more…)

For a bit of insight on how small businesses in a meat and potatoes category (Tire Dealers) view the evolution of their ad spend, see this article from TireBusiness.com (I only get it for the articles). One observation is how little performance measurement enters into the discussion of where to invest ad dollars.

I also came across this piece from the Rochester, NY, Democrat and Chronicle that talks in anecdotal terms about the trend for consumers and small-business owners to tackle repair and remodeling projects on their own. What is notable is the scale of the projects, many involving complex and possibly dangerous plumbing and electrical work. This may stand to reason in a deep recession, but it isn’t good news for contractors or the local media that sell them advertising.

Interesting counterintuitive take on small-business advertising from The Wall Street Journal’s small business advice column. The basic message is don’t overlook unsexy media choices like door hangers, Yellow Pages or the local church newsletter. They are often more targeted and effective than given credit, depending on the product and the target audience.

Interesting report here on how Yellow Pages in New Zealand is struggling with its decision to offshore its DA call center. Having been to NZ a couple of times, I can see how an offshore agent might struggle with some of the Maori words, which come in handy given so many towns have Maori names. The larger issue raised is how much of a business is call-based DA in the era of the Internet and mobile phones?