racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on cars, gadgets, technology and social media

Okay, so there were some questions on the free . com . ph offer, and I got to provide a few generic answers to some of the inquiries. Sorry I have to add to the “conditions” (but we still don’t ask for any big thing in return). Giving something for free isn’t all that easy, I’ve come to realize.

Here are more specifics on the deal.

What you get:

* A free yourname.com.ph domain. It will be registered through our .PH reseller account, but the domain will be registered under your name and email account–so you will get full control of the domain via the dotPH control panel.
* Free hosting on ploghost.com. You get the plan 150 package–I think that’s enough space and bandwidth to support an active blog.
* Any content you create will, of course, be yours–it’s your site.

So you get a total value of about PhP 3,550 or US$ 70 per year (domain + hosting). This also goes with additional value in terms of our helping out with search engine optimization–we will help direct traffic from your existing blog to your new one (SEO will also help enhance traffic in general).

What we will ask for in return:

* Content restrictions: The site must be PG-13. No smut, no adult stuff, nothing that you wouldn’t show your pre-teen brother or sister or kid. And no malware of any sort, of course.
* A link to our .com.ph campaign website in a visible position (a choice of icons/buttons will be provided).
* The domain should be actively used. In case you have an alternate domain, the .com.ph should be the one primarily used (i.e., I have racoma.net, but I’m now using racoma.com.ph as the primary domain across all our “Racoma” sites).
* For free renewals, as I mentioned earlier, we would maintain the domain and hosting free for as long as the blogger is active, in terms of writing and traffic. Okay, to be honest, we’re still ironing out the particulars in this area, but I think a couple of posts of some substance per week (and the “read this link” one-liner posts would, of course, not qualify), about 150 200-250 unique visitors per day, and 20 feedburner readers would be sufficient.
* On monetization, well, go ahead with whatever monetization plan you would like to use (i.e., AdSense, etc.), but we’d rather not have any stealthy pop-ups or pop-unders on your sites (these are quite annoying and tend to degrade the value of a website).

You’re probably thinking why we seem all-too-generous, and that giving away of .PH domains (of all things) is a bit too much. Well, we’ll be upfront in our intentions. We do have quite significant holdings in the .com.ph namespace, which we are in the process of developing. Hence, we are investing time, effort, and money to build up mindshare and value in this area.

What do we intend to achieve with this activity? For one, we would like to improve mindshare, especially among Filipinos. The current trend, I believe, is to go for generic TLDs (com, net, org) because of the price (dirt cheap), and sometimes because of some stigma and bad press connected to the use of .PH domains (because of the registry administrators).

In this regard, I hope you do understand why we have to ask for some small conditions in return. We can’t just go about giving away domains without thought, as this might actually work against our goal of developing the .com.ph namespace (i.e., say, if the sites turn out to be crappy smut sites). Hence, I think it would only be fair to ask that the domains be active and to have quality content.

What do you think?

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