A presentation at State of the Web in South East Asia by Sophia Lucero
Hello there, I am Sophia Lucero and I’ll be giving a quick overview of what it’s like here in the Philippines!
Mabuhay! - we like to say this to foreigners as a grand greeting. Literally means “long live”. And yeah, it’s almost midnight here on this side of the world.
Kumusta is from Spanish – como estas, or “how are you”. If anyone’s watching from the Philippines or is Pinoy, hello sa inyo!
Few things about me: I still call myself a web designer, more specifically I design interfaces and write front-end code, plus the occasional blog post. I’m also co-founder of Philippine Web Designers Organization, where we run meetups, workshops, & confs for the local community as volunteers, including Form Function & Class (if you guys are watching, hello PWDO friends). In these slides my name is linked to my Twitter handle, @sofimi.
So this is what the Philippines looks like.
If you can see that little notch on the left side of the largest major island Luzon, that’s Manila Bay. It’s where the capital region is, and where I am.
Manila is one of the densest places on Earth. We have lots of land around the country, but our cities are packed.
We’re about the size of the UK, and our closest neighbors are Hong Kong, Malaysia, & Indonesia.
Here’s our flag—note where the blue and red parts are located…
…and see how easy it is to do some damage when you don’t know enough about a country. On the flip side (no pun intended), it’s one of the things I find cool about our flag: it can show wartime and peacetime. That’s why I really admire Bruce’s efforts to shine a spotlight on this part of the world. I got a chance to hear his awesome talk at Webconf.asia related to this, so it’s an honor to be able to share a little bit with you today.
So what’s the state of the Web in the Philippines? The first thing that comes to mind is how bad our internet service is.
Although this is a little old, this infographic sums it up perfectly. We’re right at the bottom.
There’s been minimal improvement…
…but the majority experiences slower speeds anyway, not to mention when ISPs don’t deliver their advertised speeds…
…and it’s not very cost effective. One of the cheapest plans for 100 Mbps here costs around $66. To compare: monthly average household income is 22,000 pesos or 420 US Dollars.
And it’s a symptom of this problem we have with scale – too many people going to the cities to look for better opportunities, but the services aren’t growing fast enough to handle all of that. You get supbar services all around – even from private companies. (The photo to the left is the traffic on a major thoroughfare from north to south of the whole metro spanning multiple cities, and to the right is the queue for one of the 3 measly metro rail lines we have, which also runs down the middle of the highway in the left photo. Not enough public transport, so people that can afford to use cars use that. So congestion all around.)
In the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business study, the Philippines’ rank even slipped from 113 to 124 this year. There’s a bill in the works to encourage work-from-home, but if the internet quality is not improved, then it’s kinda futile.
It’s making competition in the outsourcing sector quite fierce – we were leading at one point but now we’re flailing a bit. The downside: we’ve gained a reputation for cheaper labor, especially in online gig marketplaces. It’s a race to rock-bottom prices.
Despite being acutely aware of how bad our speeds are, there’s not really a conscious effort to optimize websites so that they load faster. Shown here are the top local sites with huge page sizes. Devs are slowly becoming more aware of best practices, but that may sometimes contend with other business goals.
You could also say websites are not that much of a priority to optimize for, if you consider how obsessed we are about social media – almost 4 hours on average. Facebook and YouTube are our favorites.
We’re the #2 country whose information was accessed by Cambridge Analytica, and the whole “using social media to influence elections” thing happened in our 2016 elections before it happened in the US. And did our Facebook usage drop because of this? Not really.
We also prefer selling on social media: it seems more natural to sell from those places given the built-in audience and familiar UI. - If they do have full-blown online shops, people still prefer cash on delivery and bank deposit over credit cards. - Even startups, like a local motorcycle hailing service called Angkas, allows bookings via Telegram & Facebook groups. It also just got a restraining order by the court, so it kind of circumvents that by operating “underground”.
Nationwide censorship isn’t much of an issue, the government is mostly concerned with cybercrime & child pornography, though we’re actually #1 in longest time spent on PornHub, which is supposed to be officially blocked. There was also a recent issue where a Twitter user was told that Tinder was blocked on their telco due to the cybercrime law, but it turned out to be a misunderstanding. So there are those weird telco-specific & political issues related to censorship, and a whole ‘nother thing.
Telcos incentivize the use of certain sites, when you enroll in text, call, data promos. Even grocery items like laundry detergent and instant noodles offer them as freebies.
So people become overly reliant on those favored sites, especially Free FB, hence the fake news phenomenon. But even if people actually spend data to watch on YouTube, for example, it’s so easy to wind up watching propaganda videos there too. Facebook has recently implemented warnings for that content, but the damage is done; people will keep on believing the personality cults they’ve chosen to follow.
Another outsourcing job Facebook and other tech companies send to the Philippines is moderating questionable content. “The Cleaners”, as they’re called, aren’t welltrained enough to really understand the complexities of, say, terrorist content in a foreign country, and they’re certainly not supported enough for the psychological trauma of the job. You can check out the documentary on this for more info.
Even shadier are jobs that abuse the system, or the system being gamed, or the system ultimately failing to work. There are so many stories about this, it happens every day, but if you get a hold of these slides, you can click on the images for the full stories.
Another thing you should know about the Philippines is “tingi” or retail, piecemeal culture. We have these small neighborhood stores (smaller than convenience stores, usually built in front of a house) called Sari-Sari Stores, which tend to sell in small portions, like sachets. This alleviates people’s limited spending power: if something can be sold in smaller portions for cheaper, it will happen.
The tingi culture is everywhere: Although we have internet cafes that charge hourly, there are also arcade-style kiosks called Pisonet that let customers put in literal peso coins or tokens to access the internet for just a few minutes.
Spotify costs less than $3 per month, compared to the US rate of $9.99. There’s an introductory rate of ₱9 or $0.17 for 3 months. You can also use premium for just a day or a week, and you can pay by subtracting from your mobile phone credits.
Almost everyone transacts in prepaid, and this also applies to services like electricity & health. Though we aren’t in the top 10 countries worldwide.
There’s also a low penetration rate for bank accounts and credit cards. Telcos are trying to combat this with their own mobile wallet solutions that can be loaded in different stores, or that can be prepaid credit cards for online shopping. GCash, from the Globe telco, is working with Alipay, while Tencent is investing in the company developing PayMaya, from the Smart/PLDT telco. And, the big players from abroad are slowly gaining traction here.
Last thing I wanted to cover is language: unlike a lot of Asian countries, we tend to go for English over our native languages online.
Filipino & English are our official languages, but we have a lot more, and they’re not just dialects or variations of the same thing.
There’s a lot of regional pride: people are not always ok with speaking Filipino, which is based mostly on the Tagalog region, so some prefer speaking English instead. (Also a lot to unpack there for another time)
So internationalization is basically hit or miss: some people don’t like that the page is only in Filipino and not their regional language, and straight Filipino feels unnatural and harder to read, like it’s too “formal” or “deep”…
…because it’s more common to use multiple languages in casual conversation, like Taglish, which is Tagalog + English. A more effective localization would be an audio interface like Waze directions.
Our languages technically use accents for syllable emphasis and pronunciation but we don’t use them—except maybe if you’re a literary / scholarly writer. We like text speak so much that there’s a subculture & slang called Jejemon, that transformed it into something exaggerated and something entirely different. And, only tech-savvy, detail-oriented people use special characters for Ñ and the peso sign – because it’s not obvious on our keyboards.
Finally: we actually have non-Latin, pre-colonial scripts preserved through indigenous tribes. Baybayin is the most famous one, which was barely taught in school, but is undergoing a pop culture revival via typefaces, keyboard apps, calligraphy, & lifestyle products, plus a congressional bill to use it as national writing system — but since very few learned it, it’ll be a challenge actually implementing this.
And that’s my talk! If you want to know more, or if you’re in the Philippines, feel free get in touch with me on Twitter – @sofimi
Salamat!
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
South East Asia has a population of a billion people, set to double to 2 billion by 2050. It has an incredibly young demographic, and a rapidly growing middle class with disposable income. Many of these people will be your next customers.
But it’s also an amazingly diverse region, from the skyscrapers of the city state of Singapore, to the thousands of islands that make up Indonesia. Developers who live the region will tell you about their homelands, how the web differs from that in Europe and USA, the challenges they face, and give you a head start when it comes to serving new customers from the region.
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