Yellow Book issued a press release yesterday citing new results from the Yellow Pages Market Reporter that showed it has a usage leadership position in Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Northern Virginia. The release also noted that Yellow Book has moved into the No. 2 spot in the Manhattan market. The latter is important because the first wave of results put Yellow Book in the No. 3 spot in Manhattan, behind rival Ambassador Yellow Pages.

You can check out the press release for more details. These results, and we are only seeing Yellow Book’s representation of them, reinforce the fact that the U.S. directory market is evolving into one in which the advantages of incumbency are waning.

A well-funded, aggressive publisher willing to promote the brand can move into a close second or even a leadership position in a competitive market. Yellow Book makes much of the fact that its absolute rates are lower, which combined with a leading or competitive usage position, works out to a more efficient buy. This is a powerful platform, and incumbents need to figure out how to counter it if they do not wish to give up more share.

Interesting articles today in Media Post Online about how online media got the scoop on two stories before mainstream mass media. Yesterday a big news report in all media, including various online news alerts, was how CBS gave its new anchor, Katie Couric, instant weight loss by photoshopping a promotional picture.

So who developed this story? No, it wasn’t the Associated Press or CBS; it was a blogger from MediaBistro’s TV Newser site.

The big issue for bloggers is that TV Newser did not receive credit for the story. The mass media took the story like a bunch of swarming bees but never cited the source. Does the word plagiarism come to mind?

Another, perhaps more serious story is from a whistle-blower at Lockheed Martin who is accusing the company of selling $24 billion in refurbished boats to the Coast Guard. The accuser tried to use "proper" channels to disclose his story — first internal management at his company, then the AP and The Washington Post — but didn’t get a satisfactory response.

Not willing to give up, the accuser took his message online and sent a 10-minute video to YouTube. It wasn’t until it was aired on YouTube that mainstream media picked up the story.

Mainstream mass media needs to wake up and start looking over their shoulder to realize that online media is growing … with more credible content that is available to people faster than traditional mass media.

The majority of U.S. Realtors prefer online real estate to newspapers, according to a new report from Peter Zollman’s Classified Intelligence. Fifty-one percent of real estate agents surveyed said they advertise online. Many likewise plan to cut back newspaper spending budgets with the contention that it is "no longer necessary."

The Newspaper Association of America reported that classified real estate revenues were up 26.3 percent in the first quarter. However, Zollman’s outfit feels that these survey results signal a considerable shift to online advertising in the real estate vertical.

Editor & Publisher has more here, and we will run a real estate-focused panel at the upcoming ILM ‘06 conference in November.

The San Jose Mercury News’ Dean Takahashi writes about using a MySpace profile as an advertising vehicle. Lots of businesses large and small have caught on to this concept and it will continue to grow. We wrote about the local implications of this here and here. This will be an exciting area to watch in the coming months, as MySpace and other social media sites continue to evolve. Elsewhere in MySpace, here are some growth metrics for the company’s recent localization efforts in Australia.

A pair of reports released this week forecast IPTV subscriber and revenue growth for the next four years. Both Gartner and Research and Markets predict solid growth for IPTV by 2010.

The growth of IPTV will have implications for local advertising, as we’ve written about here, here and in a White Paper late last year. It will also represent vital competitive ground for the strategic bundling of voice, data, video and wireless — a battle that will increasingly heat up between cable companies and telcos.

This competition is currently being held back by legal issues, including telcos gaining the statewide franchise rights for television service. There are also cultural adoption, technical and logistical issues for IPTV service rollouts. This will represent a large battle ground for services in the coming years as many of these issues are hammered out, and local advertising will play a part in the ad models built around them. We’ll examine this further in an upcoming report on triple play.

Under the headline "Here's a $14 Billion Print Business That's Loving the Digital Revolution," Ad Age's Abbey Klaassen writes that the Yellow Pages industry "is finding traditional plus digital equals a whole greater than the sum of its parts." What is significant is that there was focus on the total increase in usage indicating that users recognize the value of Yellow Pages broadly defined.

Last week, my colleague Jane Dennison-Bauer wrote a blog analyzing the results of the Yellow Pages Association's annual usage study. Not surprisingly, the number of references was down but by a miniscule amount from 14.6 billion to 14.5 billion. Meanwhile, Internet references grew by 300 million, an increase of 20 percent. In an electronic environment where most of the world seems to think that old media like print Yellow Pages are going down the tubes, Jane's analysis demonstrates the health of the industry. And don't forget, no other medium has margins like the print Yellow Pages.

The Kelsey Report's Program Director, Charles Laughlin, wrote an excellent Advisory last week titled "Print Foundation Solid in Australia, New Zealand." Indeed, TKG research shows that while 61 percent of consumers in the U.S. turn to print Yellow Pages first when searching for a local business (and 52 percent do in Europe), 73 percent go to the book in New Zealand. Telecom Corp., New Zealand's largest telephone company, was reported to be "considering selling its Yellow Pages directory unit" to focus on high-speed Internet and mobile services. Telecom is right to keep its options open, but it would be wrong to sell it for less than 16 to 18 times earnings.

Five years ago we didn't know which local media would be hardest hit by the Internet. It is clear now that the Yellow Pages business is a long-term survivor. We don't know of a private equity or venture capital firm that has lost money investing in Yellow Pages. Usage numbers and market research suggest that the present value of the highly profitable print Yellow Pages business and the rapidly growing IYP/local search industry is higher than anyone has paid to date.

That's why we are pleased to see Advertising Age, which usually doesn't pay much attention to YP because of its low sex appeal, recognize that this is a helluva business.

Yahoo! continues to integrate different forms of social media. This time the venue for the integration is Yahoo! Maps. Om Malik’s blog reports that Yahoo! Local today will bring in the Flickr photo-sharing service and Upcoming, a social online calendar service it bought last year. Users of Yahoo! Maps will be able to search for images and events that are uploaded by other users and tagged so that they appear in geographically relevant ways in Yahoo! Maps.

This has many implications for businesses to supply more rich information about themselves, although it’s unclear how or if this will be initially integrated with other small-business advertising products within Yahoo! Local, such as its featured listings. It is clear, however, that this will bring more functionality to Yahoo! Local, as it is built on Yahoo! Maps (the two, like Google’s mapping and Local products, are converging in many ways).

This also brings Yahoo! one step further down the social media path. The integration of photos and events, for example, is an intuitive one. GigaOm writer Liz Gannes also adeptly points out that the next step in socializing these offerings for Yahoo! could be presence integration via Yahoo! Messenger.

Elsewhere in social media, The San Francisco Chronicle profiles a number of unsung "Web 2.0" companies that we could hear more from if the social media space holds its current course.

There has been substantial coverage today on the ad deal formed between eBay and Google. There is a lot to this deal, notably the pay-per-call advertising implications brought by the integration of eBay-owned Skype and Google’s extensive online ad network (the Google Talk IM and voice client will be integrated as well). We will have more to say on this later in the week. For now, here is coverage from The New York Times, the AP and SEW.

We often cite U.S. Census Bureau data that report e-commerce accounts for only 2.5 percent of total U.S. retail spending (the rest is offline). Here is an indication that this is shifting. If this is true, it could have considerable effects on shopping engines, local search and business models built on leading offline purchases with coupons and inventory data. These are important models, and the variables that affect them will be further analyzed in a few reports we have in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

Search Engine Watch speculates that Yahoo!’s Panama search engine marketing platform could be here sooner than its recent delays have indicated.