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).
