No improvement from dotph pricing yet.

I’ve heard that line from dotPH themselves and I’m still waiting. So long as they keep their prices at $35, I don’t think it’s a good idea at all to promote .COM.PH. I don’t want to be feeding a monopoly (specially if they don’t play fair).

A logical move would be for them to at least reprice at $15. That’s a fair compromise considering that CNO domains are approximately $8-$9 a year.

By the way, the actual costs for CNO domains exceed $6. So companies offering domains for less than that (e.g. Yahoo $2.95 domains) are basically trying to reel in customers and hope to get additional services.

... The initial plan was to get a .ph to simply say to the world that “hey! this site is by a Filipino, for the Filipinos” but after days of price and feature comparison …

Here goes my thoughts on this.

But something tells me that will change in the near future.

If the price of .ph and CNO domains are the same, a lot of Pinoys will go for .ph even if it costs 1,500 pesos.

Unfortunately, a .ph domain is relatively too expensive compared to a CNO domain. So now a Pinoy might think he will pay too much if he go for a .ph. Imagine, one .ph domain costs three CNO domains. If a Pinoy is willing to spend 1,500 pesos, he might consider buying 3 CNO domains (covering .com, .net, .org) rather that a single .ph.

If the price difference between .ph and a CNO is only 1 or 2 hundred pesos, cost will not anymore be a big factor. The benefit of having your own .ph domain will outweigh the extra 2 hundred pesos. Of course, this is just a pricing theory and from what I’ve learned, pricing is more of an art than science

I am also speaking from an individual standpoint. For me, 1,500 is too much but for a business entity, even for a small enterprise, it may not be an issue. As an individual, I am price sensitive because I need to produce this amount but for companies, they have ways to source the money either passing it to their clients, or tax incentive.

I guess dotPH is banking on companies – who are willing to pay the higher amount. Let’s assume the real cost of a domain is only 500 pesos. If dotPH offers a .ph for 700 pesos, the profit is 200 pesos (I am simplifying things here.) To reach a profit of 20,000, 100 people must buy a .ph domain. But if dotPH offers it at 1,500 pesos, they only need 20 buyers to reach the same profit as with 100 people on 700 pesos price tag. Same profit, less clients (and less client to support, to maintain, to monitor, etc.)

Sometimes, to be profitable, you don’t need to have more customers. Just get more money from few customers.

What dotPH can do is offer discounts to individuals in exchange for something. For example, a .ph for non-commercial use or single user blog website in exchange for an ad.