YELLOW PAGES in Australia will not follow the US version into a death spiral despite grumblings by local advertisers about waning results and Yellow Pages in North America being placed in Chapter 11 bankruptcy last Friday.

The chief executive of Sensis, Bruce Akhurst, told the Herald yesterday that Yellow Pages was defying the global trend for declining use of print directories and there had been no deterioration in the local printed version for at least five years.

The trend overseas is vastly different, with one of the four main Yellow publishers in the US, RH Donnelly, going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week with debts of $US12.4 billion ($15.2 billion). Some US forecasters say advertising spending in North American directories will plunge 39 per cent over the next four years.

An online rival to Yellow Pages, Reach Local, a joint venture between News Limited and investors led by the former Microsoft and PBL Media director Daniel Petre, claims Yellow faces difficulty retaining margins and advertisers and meeting ad deadlines for its 2010 editions.

Reach Local's chief executive, Steve Power, said Yellow Pages was losing its pulling power among small and medium advertisers at an "alarming rate". He cited a long list of advertisers - including the private eye firm Lyonswood Investigations - that have either stopped or dramatically reduced their spending in Yellow Pages in favour of online search campaigns.

"It's been a phenomenal cash cow, but Yellow Pages is now finding it very difficult retaining advertisers," Mr Power said. "We've done some tracking on Yellow Pages with phone numbers and the calls those advertisers are getting from it. It's alarming. Businesses that are spending $100,000 a year are getting 15 or 20 calls per week. The cost per call is terrifying."

Mr Akhurst said users of the print edition had remained steady for the past nine quarters at about 1 million people a day. "We are about halfway through our metropolitan canvasses and I'm pretty pleased with how they are going," he said. "There is no deviation in trends. I don't know where all this has come from. We'll have more customers this year than last. One thing which isn't well known outside the industry is that of the more than 1 million people who use our print products every day, 90 per cent of those go on to contact a supplier and 72 per cent actually buy something. That's a pretty phenomenal conversion rate."

Mr Akhurst said Sensis had increased the number of Yellow Pages-specific phone numbers for display advertisers from 350 to 7000 in the past two years, enabling the company and its advertisers to track response rates. "We have not been running a business with a view to transitioning our customers from print to online," he said. "The print product is not dead by any means."

Yellow Pages had extended its "audience reach" by 28 per cent in the past 18 months, Mr Akhurst said, by adding online search, mobiles and 1234 phone connection services to the offer. He said much of the trouble overseas was caused by private equity firms that cut costs rather than invest in the businesses.