How did "Yellow Pages" get its name? Why they are printed in yellow colour?

In many countries, the Yellow Pages refers to a telephone directory for businesses organized by the category of product or service. As the name suggests, they are usually printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages with non-commercial listings, printed on white paper. With the advent of Internet, the traditional term 'Yellow Pages' became applied to online directories of businesses.

The name and concept "Yellow Pages" were invented in the USA, over a century ago. The expression 'yellow pages' is used all around the world, in both English and non-English speaking countries.

While AT&T and GTE (the two major phone companies in the U.S.) dominated the U.S. yellow pages industry until at least the anti-trust breakup of the Bell System in 1984, the term "Yellow Pages" and the "walking fingers" logo were trademarks, but have been in the public domain since the 1950s when AT&T failed to renew the trademark registrations. This gave rise to a small but fast-growing "independent yellow pages" industry. Directories were published on behalf of the component Bell companies by the various publishing companies. The "independents" are unrelated to the incumbent phone company and are either pure advertising operations with no phone infrastructure or telephone companies who provide local telephone service elsewhere.

Yellow pages publishers or their agents sell the right to place advertisements within the same category, next to the basic listings.

For example, AT&T is the dominant local telephone service provider in California, but since Bell Atlantic and GTE merged to become Verizon, it now provides service in many pockets such as West Los Angeles. Los Angeles telephone users can select from telephone directories published by AT&T, Verizon, and several independent publishing companies like Yellowbook USA.

[edit] United Kingdom

The first Yellow Pages directory in the UK was produced by the Hull Corporation's telephone department (now Kingston Communications) in 1954. This was distributed with the classified phone directory rather than as a stand-alone publication.

With the encouragement of The Thomson Corporation, at the time an advertising sales agent for the nationalised General Post Office's telephone directory, a business telephone number directory named the Yellow Pages was first produced in 1966 by the GPO for the Brighton area, and was rolled out nationwide in 1973. The Thomson Corporation formed Thomson Yellow Pages in 1966 to publish and to distribute the directory to telephone subscribers for the GPO, and later for The Post Office.

Thomson Yellow Pages was sold by The Thomson Corporation in 1980, at the same time as Post Office Telecommunications became the (then) state-owned British Telecom (BT). The Yellow Pages directory continued to be distributed to all telephone subscribers by BT. At the same time, The Thomson Corporation formed Thomson Directories Ltd, and began to publish the Thomson Local directory, which would remain the Yellow Pages' main, and often sole, competitor in the UK for more than the next two decades, and would be the competitive driving force behind such changes to Yellow Pages as the adoption (in 1999) of colour printing and "white knock out" listings.

In 1984, the year that BT was privatized, the department producing the directory became a stand alone subsidiary of BT, named Yellow Pages. In the mid-1990s the Yellow Pages business was re-branded as Yell, although the directory itself continued to be known as the Yellow Pages.

Yell was bought by venture capitalists in 2001, and in 2003 was floated on the Stock Exchange. After the one year "no competition" clause expired BT too went into competition with the Yellow Pages, re-entering the market by adding similar content to their existing "The Phone Book", adding a classified section to the traditional alphabetical domestic and business listings.

Yellow Pages, Thomson Local and BT's The Phone Book display advertising and can be booked directly with advertising sales representatives.