PLDT myDSL call

April 8, 2007

I recently came across this Odeo post of a myDSL customer sales representative being berated by a customer. The irate customer first begins by repeating and repeating his problems with myDSL. Then this escalates to swearing at the female customer rep. He swears "P* I*" at the rep,  gets her to break down, and not the least bit affected by the girl's emotional state, continues to swear P* I* about 15x!  Not content with that, he later edits the dialog, posts it  online, perhaps to highlight the inefficiency of PLDT's customer service, or my guess is,  as an attempt to get the young girl fired. But what amazes me more, is how the vast majority of comments to this post are unsympathetic and actually  blame the girl - for crying, for being unprofessional, for being uninformed!

 What is clear to me, is that there is a glaring  discrepancy in the way our society treats the poor. Kung hindi lang nag-tagalog yung sales rep, I don't think the (male) customer would have sworn invectives at her. If the girl had answered the phone with Call Center English, the customer would have assumed that girl was educated and perhaps of a higher social strata, and would have probably been more courteous. 

Just because the poor are powerless doesn't mean the rest of us should treat them callously, or  forget they are human beings in the first place.

Dotph prices revisited

It looks like my comment on Yugatech seems to have generated a lot of comments. Now I can appreciate why Yuga's blog has pretty high Alexa rankings (rank = 22,186) compared to say, Cebupacificair.com (27,794),  FHM.com.ph (24,915), or www.gov.ph (43,108).

My original post was addressed  to the SEO/Adsense community, in an attempt to find out what their needs were and to create a product that was suitable to that segment. 

Instead, the responses seem to come more from individuals , and along the lines of "well, what about the rest of us"?

So let me address that.

First of all, there seems to be this misconception that DotPH prices are expensive, vis-a-vis those of other countries.  If you compare how Registrars retail PH prices compare against other ccTLDs, you'll see that PH is actually cheaper than most countries. An adsense ad on Yugatech's page, for example,  leads to this AsiaRegistry pricelist.    You'll see that in Asia, only NZ and Australia  retail substantially more aggressively than PH (and that's not because of the Registry price, but because of the volumes these ccTLDs can command). 

For instance, here are .AU's Registry prices:

http://www.ausregistry.com.au/news/news84.php

 The starting wholesale price for a com. AU domain is AU$50, which is roughly US$40.98. Note that PH wholesale prices start at far less ($27.50), and for both Registries, there is a drop in price the more volume you buy.

 

So I think the real issue should not be - why is a PH domain expensive, but why can't it be as cheap as a COM domain?

I thought the answer to this was obvious, having been touched before by other posters. But I'll recap.

 The main reason PH is more expensive than COM is that all the good domains in COM are all  gone. You can be  the owner of "Maldita" and use a domain like Maldita.PH or settle for Maldita-clothingforwomen.com.  You might save a little by buying a COM domain through a discount domain company, but then you'll have to spend millions more just to get people to remember your COM domain name. Because in the end, domain names are like 1-800 numbers. In the US, one pays thousands of dollars for expensive 1-800 numbers because they are easy to remember. I will have no problem remembering the URL of Maldita.PH but It will take millions in Advertising for me to remember the URL   Maldita-clothingforwomen.com. So in general, the extra $ one spends on a memorable PH domain is money well spent. 

The other reason why PH is sold at a premium  to COM, and perhaps a less obscure reason, is that Search Engines like Google only have 2 ways of determining if a website is in the Philippines. One is its IP address, and the other - is if it ends in PH. So if you're shopping online for clothes, and you want Google to show you all  clothing websites in the Philippines (by hitting the radio button "only show pages in the Philippines"), Google will not find Maldita-clothingforwomen.com (given that most philippine companies host their websites abroad), but Google will easily find Maldita.PH.  (Note that if the COM domain is hosted in the US, Google will assume that the COM website is NOT Philippine-related.)

So - in a nutshell -  this is why ccTLD domains are priced higher than COM. People may want to save a little buy buying a COM, but if their market is primarily based in the Philippines, and if  Search Engine Traffic is important to them, then getting a PH domain (even at a higher price) makes more sense.

Having said that, let me also point out that DotPH has not forgotten individuals, and the blogging community. Three years ago, we created  the i.ph domain - a Free domain that comes with mail-forwarding, blogging software, customizable templates, photo gallery, podcasting,  free webhosting, and even free livechat support. It's 100%  made in the Philippines, and lot better than Blogger or Livejournal or Myspace, or Multiply. Check it out at http://i.ph.  And feel free to post your comments on our forums.