Joel Disini responds to dot.PH Pricing discussion

Joel Disini, President & CEO of dot.PH, responds to our earlier discussion here last October entitled “Why dotPH is still expensive?“.

In his comment, left yesterday evening, he said:

Hi,

I just recently discovered this thread, and I thought I’d directly respond to the group. Hopefully, people are still willing to discuss this topic.

My understanding is that most of the readers here are Adsense/SEO people? If so, I’ll try to address my thoughts appropriately.

First of all, DotPH pricing at $35/year is the retail price. The wholesale price is a lot cheaper, and goes as low as $15/year, depending on your volume of registrations. This has been the case as far back as 2000, when very few ccTLDs were selling below the $35 level. The Registrar prices are located here:
http://www.domains.ph/PartnerApply.asp

As you can see, the discounts begin once you have at least 12 domains to register.

So it might make sense for some of you to join forces, and buy in bulk – so you can enjoy larger discounts – or work with one of our existing Registrars. We have over 150 Registrars – practically every ISP in the Philippines and Webhosting company is a Registrar. (Now whether they wish to pass on the discounts to you – that is entirely another matter).

If your need is to get lots of domains so that you can point them to your main website (so as to increase its Google rank), then perhaps we can discuss creating some price that favors the SEO community. If some of you recall, we actually gave a way 18+ character domains several years ago – for free. This way you can get domains with your desired keywords, then direct people to your main money site. Or you can monetize them with SEDO, DomainSponsor, or some similar domain monetizing company. We’ve also toyed with the option of lowering price for net.ph & org.ph – but we’d like to get more feedback first.

But if you are domainers and want to buy domains, hold, and sell them later, you might want to look at mail-only domains. These only cost $5/year and can be later updated to full functionality (once you pay $35/year). So this means you can speculate (if you wish) and grab all the domains that you think will be of value in the future. They you can sell them later at a profit.

I am currently at the ICANN conference in Portugal, and Tim Schumacher of SEDO tells me that the average resale price these days for domains is about 20k. That’s a pretty impressive amount. Naturally, ccTLD domains don’t sell that high – but once more and more Philippine businesses get online, you should find the aftermarket price for PH domains going up.

If you have ideas, please feel free to post comments on my blog at jed.i.ph (it is unmoderated). Or if you prefer, you can call/email us directly. (The contact details are here:

http://www.domains.ph/ContactUs.asp
.
This way, we can respond more quickly to your concerns.

He also wrote about it in his personal blog here.