Does it really matter what domain register you use?  Aren’t they all pretty much the same except for some minor cost differences and maybe difficulty to use?

I assumed that was the case before I did this study.  Unlike hosting companies, pretty much all of the domain registrars are “up” 100% of the time.  Some are annoying with their user interface.  Some are more costly.  I assumed that was the major differences.  How could the choice of a domain register make much difference to the bottom line?

I really don’t know the answer to that question.  That is one of the shortcomings of doing statistical analysis of meta systems.  You don’t get to know “why” something is different (in this case more or less profitable).  You just get to know that there is a difference (statistical significance) and which domain registers are used more often by profitable companies and which are used more often by unprofitable companies.

So I was as surprised as you will be when I saw the results of the study.  I built a list of profitable Internet sites (based on them running the same ad on a major search engine for an extended period of time) and less profitable sites (based on them running an ad, but then dropping it after a short period of time.

Then I looked up their domain registers.  I expected to see the data pretty much even.  The distribution would fall pretty much along the lines of the biggest domain registers.  Within each domain register, I expected that the distribution of profitable and unprofitable sites would be pretty much the same.

I was wrong.  I was VERY wrong.  The statistical significance of the results is staggering.  There is a significant difference in profitability of companies that choose “X” domain register over “Y” domain register.

Here are the scores of the top five winners:

Mark Monitor: 70
Network Solutions: 26
Tucows: 13
Corporate Domains: 9
Edu Cause: 7

And the HUGE winner wasn’t even known to me until I did this study.  I had NEVER even heard of Mark Monitor before!

Once we check out Mark Monitor, we can see that we need to be doing about $50 million in yearly revenue before they will even accept us as a client.  We also need to have a well known brand that needs to be protected.  That is actually their core business.  They help protect brands.  They just happen to perform domain registration as a part of that business.

That means that most people will need to go with the #2 choice in this case.

This may be a minor business decision that doesn’t affect profitability very much after everything is said and done.  But it might be.  Why not get with the correlation group and do what other profitable businesses are doing?  Go with the winner!