How is that possible?  Well… With statistical studies, sometimes the reason can never be known.  You get to know the “what”, but you just don’t get to know the “why.”  You can guess all day long (and it is human nature to do so), but you can never actually answer “why” questions with any kind of scientific analysis.  “Why” is actually the purview of religions, not science.

The discussion among customers has focused a lot on the top domain registrar in the profitability study.  That registrar wasn’t even known to most customers (nor to me) before the study.  Many of us went to the web-site of the top domain register to immediately register a domain.

We were stumped by the web-site at first.  It wasn’t possible to just register a domain.  After looking around for awhile, we started to understand the reason for the top domain registrar.  Their business isn’t domain registration.  It is something else which was very interesting.  They just happen to do domain registration as a very small part of their main business objective.  And yet, they are the domain register of choice for a large percentage of profitable Internet businesses.

Most of us will have to start with the #2 choice and that is OK.  It is still better than many other choices.

One customer asked the following question:

“Would it be worth the time, effort and expense of changing registrars for ourselves and our clients if we have a large number of domains?”

The answer depends on the registrar you are using.  If you are using one of the worst registrars, then YES… change to one of the winning registrars!

Not everyone can use the top registrar.  You need to have your business at a particular level of maturity to use it.  But the other registrars in the winning list are accessible to anyone with an online business.  If you aren’t using one of those registrars, then I would definitely change registrars.  The difference in profitability in the statistics is staggering.

The reason?  There is a lot of discussion about that as well.  Some have theories that the bottom two registrars have simply advertised in ways that have attracted a lot of less business savvy people.  That is possible.  Some theorize that the search engines use domain registrars in their ranking algorithms.  That is possible.  Some theorize that one of the two worst registrars has a history of stealing domain names that have high traffic.  If true, that is a possible reason.

It really isn’t very productive to spend much time theorizing about the “why” questions of such a mundane business topic.  It just doesn’t matter “why” some domain registrars are more profitable than others.  It just matters which ones.  Just go with the top registrar that is accessible to you based on the maturity level of your company (since the top two aren’t accessible to new businesses).  Let the philosophers and forum junkies worry about the “why” questions.  That is their job.  Our job as business owners is to increase profits.