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Most of the time wall street’s valuation process can be used as an indicator of trends, and can often be used as a litmus test to determine conditions in various sectors of the economy, perhaps not to measure the real time “value” of this or that but to guage how investors view the future of certain industries.

For the past 5 years we have witnessed the market reward Google, which comes as no surprise to anyone who has witnessed the revenue shift from print to digital.  Rather, the surprise has been the lack of penalization (in market terms) in the print advertising industry, in particular the Yellow Page industry the Google’s direct competitor.  Over the past year Google’s stock has been as high as $700 and currently hovers around $450 per share, up from around $100 since the IPO.   Meanwhile, RHD (R.H. Donnelley the leading US Yellow Page Company http://www.rhd.com/) has been as high as $80, and up from $50 during Google’s IPO. 

Initally, it looked like Wall Street was betting on RHD’s ability to shift from a player in the print market to a player in the digital market.

Well — the shift never happened.  Over the past several weeks RHD has hit an all time low of $4.27, and is currently hovering around $5.25.

This comes as little surprise to SEO/SEM companies like The Search Engine Guys, LLC.   Yet another example of an “ocean liner” unable to tack in time to survive.