Yell eyes ‘ideal customer’ as it sinks further into the red and cuts jobs

Yell, the digital marketing and online directory business, sunk further into the red during its latest financial year as it focused on “attracting and retaining customers who meet our ideal customer profile exclusively”.

The Reading-headquartered company, which first distributed copies of the Yellow Pages in the 1960s, has posted a pre-tax loss of £3.5m for the year to March 31, 2024, after also making a loss of £2.6m in the prior 12 months.

According to newly-filed accounts with Companies House, Yell’s revenue also dipped from £111m to £102.5m over the same period.

Yell said its revenue was down “in part following a conscious decision to reduce effort and costs to acquire and retain large spending/low margin DMS customers combined with a reduction in the Yell platform revenue”.

The company generated a revenue of £51.8m from its Yell platform, down from £56.9m, and £50.2m from other digital marketing services, down from £54.1m.

During the year its average month employees fell from 1,038 to 894.

The average monthly visits to the Yell platform decreased from 7.2 million to 5.4 million “largely mirroring trends seen across the industry”.

The company added that customer numbers were down as it “adjusted our focus to acquiring and retaining customers who meet our ideal customer profile exclusively”.

Yell said that its increased investment in SEO “stabilised monthly traffic” at the end of its third quarter but that it expects to see a “declining trajectory on the trailing 12-month figure for a few more quarters”.

The first edition of the Yellow Pages was delivered in 1966, with the final copies being released in 2019. Yell.com was launched in 1996.

In January 2001, Yell a demerger from its parent company, BT, and abandoned a proposed stock market flotation.

Later that year, was sold to venture capitalists Apax Partners and Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst for £2.1bn.

Yell is now owned by a range of investment funds controlled by the likes of Empyrean Capital, Global Income SA, Goldentree Insurance and Citigroup.