On Tuesday, Yellow Pages Group Canada (YPG) announced that it has struck a deal with Canpages, one of Canada’s top Yellow Pages and Internet Yellow Pages publishers. YPG will acquire Canpages for roughly C$225 million in hopes of harnessing Canpages’ established user base and technology to accelerate YPG’s transition to digital.

This deal comes just one month after YPG announced its acquisition of the third major player in the Canadian IYP landscape: 411.ca. The three properties combine to make up 89 percent of the Canadian IYP market share, according to comScore Canada’s February 2010 Key Measures report.

It is safe to say that YPG now has a stronghold on the Canadian IYP market share. What effect will this have on advertisers and consumers? It appears that both will benefit from the expanded distribution of content across the three properties. Advertisers will gain greater visibility as their business listings are distributed to YPG’s growing network, and users will benefit from the bevy of local business info (in addition to improved search technology).

A common question among advertisers and agencies is what will happen to the market share of these three entities? My guess is that much of the traffic on these sites will be funneled to and from YPG’s flagship site Yellowpages.ca, which will eventually gain an even greater market share because of this.