Official Statement from DotPH on the future of COM.PH vs. .PH Domain Names

in Domain Names Entrepreneurship Tech News by Francis Simisim — July 29, 2009 at 12:00 PM | 12 comments

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I’ve been preaching about PH domain names for quite a few months now, it has been interesting and full of potential. But like all domain name investors (domainers), we’d like to know about which extension should we go with? .COM.PH or .PH? Joel Disini from DotPH has finally answered the questions and has clarified a lot on the future of PH domain names…

I’ve broken down Joel’s statement to give my own opinions:

“In a forthcoming ad campaign, which we hope to launch in the next 4 months, we will try to highlight the importance of brands and trademarks. A lot of people get the COM domain because they want to be perceived as being a global company, this despite the fact that practically all of their clientele is from the Philippines.  In doing so, they end up with a hard-to-remember URL (as the COM domain they want is already taken). For example, Cebupacific had to settle for cebupacificair.com, instead of cebupacific.com. We believe cebupacific.PH is more memorable.  Or Landco settled for LandcoPacific.com, instead of landco.PH. We’ve convinced landco to switch to the latter. More info about the thrust of this campaign is available on Why.PH. The ad compaign attempts to convince people that the more expensive PH domain is justified, if you believe there is value in having a more memorable domain.

What does this have to do with com.PH vs PH? We believe shorter is better as far as domain names go. They’re more memorable. So we will always attempt to push people towards PH instead of com.PH in these ads…”

I’m very happy to hear that DotPH is finally going to be launching ad campaigns to give PH domain names a good push. And I totally agree with Joel, Philippines based companies are not understanding the value of domain names and is contented with longer and hard to remember .COM. I think it’s about time that companies should see the power of ccTLDs and understand that search engines are going to give it priority very soon. What’s really interesting is that the company is going to push .PH vs .COM.PH which should give .PH domain names higher traffic (therefore higher value than .COM.PH).

“As far as numbers go, PH registrations have exceeded COM.PH registrations for several years. As for type-in traffic, some of you may know that PH is one of the few ccTLDs that monetize their wildcard. We find that for the 4 day period July 8- 11, com.PH had 101T unique visitors, whereas .PH had 116T uniques.  This tells me that there are more people typing in .PH on their browsers than there are typing in .COM.PH.   I’m really curious nevertheless as to why it is that a site like realestate.PH has less traffic than realestate.com.PH.  Perhaps the latter has more links? You’ll also find from Alexa the number of big ticket PH sites is beginning to exceed COM.PH sites – eg ebay.ph, pep.PH, levelupgames.PH.  Only sulit.com.ph is bigger.

So to summarize, we believe the story for PH vs COM.PH will follow the same path as Hk vs com.HK, MY vs COM.MY, PL vs COM.PL, etc.

- Joel Disini
DotPH”

– The link to the original post on ccTLDs by Joel Disini (here). –

The most interesting part of this statement is the comment of Joel on the higher registration on .PH vs .COM.PH, which proves that short is better. Although I’ve asked people what would they likely type on their browser .PH or .COM.PH, where the .COM.PH always wins, it’s a whole new scenario when they type in the address bar. With the confirmation of Joel on this case, .PH has finally exceeded .COM.PH (thru a test from July 8 – 11), .COM.PH had 101K unique visitors while .PH had 116K. The most important statement of all is the vision of DotPH, stating that .PH is bound to follow other country’s ccTLDs where the straight forward version wins. With that I’m sure that the gap between the two will increase very soon and .PH will be seen as the country’s main ccTLD. I think it’s good to clarify things up and show PH Domain name investors where to bank their money on. For companies, its good to know which extension should you go for.

As a domain name investor, I’m happy that I was able to make the right choice on .PH. What I did was that I registered .COM.PH of the domain names that I really liked and .PH of those that I want to test out. I’d like to thank Joel Disini for clearing things up and to show continuous promotion of PH domain names. It won’t be long before we see PH domain names doing better in the Philippines than gTLDs.

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