It never ceases to amaze me the amount of times I open a thread on Yell and read the usual lynch-mob baying for the blood of internet directories.
Whilst I can see that some posters on this thread have physically spent their own money advertising with Yell and not garnered the results they wanted, once again the majority of the criticism and what appears to be genuine hate comes from people and companies who have gained some sort of proxy hatred for Yell through OTHER PEOPLE's experiences, which I find fundamentally wrong.
The replies mostly consist of people opportunistically plugging their own directories in response to the Yell complaint, even though in many cases they couldn't dream of matching the reach of a big directory such as Yell.
If it's not the opportunistic replies, it's the one's where companies who've never advertised with them tell others how horrible it is.
The only thing I will probably say ad sales people can be guity of is the smash and grab mentality - i.e selling you a cheap advert under a classification and area where there are already 50 people advertising, rendering the advert useless before it's even begun.
I'll give you an example - I requested stats from Yell a couple of months back for a client of mine in London who was looking for domestic cleaning leads. He'd looked on their site and wanted to do a £300 weblink. Problem was, when I got the stats from Yell, those ads were getting about 89 views a month each - Utterly pathetic and nearly impossible to get a return on.
They also gave me stats for their heavyweight ads - there was actually just the one in the part of London he was in - and it was seen on average 15,000+ per month! The heavyweight ad was much more expensive but worth it for the return.
....and to those of you peddling the myth about Yell 'never working' and so on, I'll happily supply with you with the details of numerous companies who I know it DOES work for.