Originally Posted by jdisini

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.

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