YugaTech | Philippines, Tech Reviews Blog

It’s no contest that .com domains are the most popular ones today — over 71 million of them registered as of February 2008. We might also think that the .net domains will come in second. Well, according to EuropeRegistry, it looks like Germany’s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) has surpassed the dotNet TLD to get the second place globally.

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This is an ongoing discussion over at SEO Philippines Yahoogroups so I’m re-posting my answer there here.

Disclosure: I am an .PH reseller.

I have been meeting with the PH team for some time now and I have been somewhat discussing with them the idea of lowering the prices. I’ve also had talks with JJ Disini and he himself tells me that he’s talking to the older brother about slashing off the prices.

There are so many factors why the pricing has been stagnant for years. I’ve also asked them the total number of active PH domains and though I didn’t get an exact answer, my guesstimate was in the range of 125k to 150k.

First, PH is not the most expensive — .TV is $38, .JP is $99, .BE is $39, .AT is $79, .NZ is $69, .CC is $39. The CNO namespace is universal and the ccTLD is country specific, so we can’t really compare prices for the two considering the fact that volume of domains are way way apart. The best scale would be to compare PH pricing with other ccTLD pricing.

Second, supply and demand — will lowering the price assure increase in sales? That is, will cutting the price into 3 folds create enough demand to triple the sales volume (thereby maintaining gross revenue)? Remember, it is still a business. Take for example the local hosting industry. It’s really expensive compared to the rest in the US. Can we point to a local hosting company that can match the pricing of DreamHost, 1&1, Powweb, etc?

Third, target market — this is in conjunction with #2 actually. I was told a huge percentage of .PH domains are bought for branding and IP by big companies and corporations worldwide. These are in the tens of thousands of companies who want to claim ownership of their domain name before other squatters do. The logic goes like — if PH domain sells domains at $100, eBay, Microsoft will still buy the domain; same way that they’ll pay if the price was just $10. The question becomes, will all SMEs and individuals buy PH domains instead of a .COM despite these changes? There’s no assurance there.

Fourth, protecting the existing resellers. This I only realized when I became a reseller. Say Resellers get their PH domains at $25/year and sell them at $30 per year. It’s still lower than $70/2 years to entice customers to buy from the resellers and not directly from dotPH.

Lastly, and this one’s my theory, self-preservation. Look at Microsoft — it was able to maintain its dominance and success because it had something people needed and only Microsoft can provide. Has FOSS able to shift the market demand and pressured M$ to lower licensing fees? So, let’s ask ourselves that if we owned dotPH, would we still subscribe to the same reasoning against the monopoly that is dotPH? What company would want lower revenues, eh?

These are reasons given to me during our discussions.

Don’t get me wrong — I want the prices to go down too and I am constantly having discussions with them about this (although it may seem a futile effort).

Notice that everytime you visit Google.com, you’re automatically redirected to Google.com.ph? And you will notice that results from Google.com and Google.com.ph will not be the same in terms of results placement.

So what contributes to the difference?

1) Web Hosting location or IP

2) ccTLD or Country Code Top Level Domain

It means that if your site is hosted in the Philippines (or an to an IP that is known to be assigned to the Philippines), Google.com.ph will favor you more in the search results.

The same is true for .PH domains. Assuming that everything else is the same, sites on .PH domains will rank higher when searched thru Google.com.ph.

So, aside from the branding (and Intellectual Property) spiel, you have another reason to use .PH domains for your site (IF you are targetting visitors from the Philippines).

If only the cost of registration would go down a little bit. (As I have always discussed this with their Channel Manager and I hope they are re-considering the cost aspect.)

(* SERP – search engine results page)

[tags]doamins, ccTLD, TLD, PH, search, local[/tags]