Observations with my dotPH investments in .ph and .com.ph domains

I’ve started investing in .PH and .COM.PH last 2009 around April to May, it was one of my largest investments online costing me thousands of dollars to register. I certainly believe in its value that its going to be worth a lot in the future one day, but as to when that could be still remains to be a question and could be a long wait. Here are some of my observations with my own .PH and .COM.PH domains…

… I’ve always been a big fan of development, all I want is to keep developing websites before I even got into domaining. As a matter of fact, my main goal was to make web 2.0 websites but as it got too complicated I had resorted to something more simpler to scale up. My favorite type of development for my domains are minisites and that’s what I did with my .PH and .COM.PH domains.

– My interest lies in web development –

Building minisites on .PH has shown me what the power of a generic domain can do for your SEO, in a matter of days, I was ranking highly in my own country’s searches. However, as I time went by, the minisites I had can’t really pay for its own renewal fees and are only earning a few dollars (sometimes cents) from PPC (CPC is low) compared to a gTLD (.COM / .NET / .ORG / .INFO etc) which earns those in a day. There’s also another thing that I found both good and bad to .PH domains is that the transfer process is hard. To transfer a domain, you’d need to sign paperworks and fax both to buyer or seller then back to dotPH company. It’s very secure on domain hijacking but can really be a hurdle in selling domains to others.

So did I make the wrong decision to invest in .PH? No, its simply because .PH domains are not built for minisites, it is for full blown web development. It’s great SEO and can get significant traffic in the local area, but its just that you’d need to spend more time on really developing interesting websites before launching it as opposed to minisites. Best thing as well is that since there are only a few websites launched locally, there’s not much competition for direct advertisers. I’m currently developing some interesting website concepts which I expect to launch really soon, I’ll post it up when its launched.