Top Level Domain

A “top level domain” (TLD for short) is the part of your web-site address that comes after the last period or dot.  For instance, if your website is at http://TestiVar.com , then your TLD is “com.”  Such a web-site is often called a “dot com” because the site’s name ends in a “dot” or a period and then a “com.”

There are many TLDs to choose from.  Some of the other common TLDs are .net, .org, .info, .edu and many other country specific TLDs like .us, .uk, .ca and others.

Which one is the most profitable to choose for your website?

We did the study to find out.  We built a list of thousands of random sites for a control.  We also built a list of thousands of sites that are known to be profitable.  We then compared the top level domain (TLD) of profitable sites against the control group.

We developed a scoring system that would show TLDs that were more likely to be profitable having a positive score and TLDs that were less likely to be profitable having negative scores.

While we were surprised that some other TLDs had slightly positive scores, the results speak for themselves.  Here are the scores of the top 5 most profitable TLDs and their respective scores:

com: 120
info: 9
edu: 8
org: 2
tv: 1

Lesson learned: If you want to run a profitable online business, then register a .com domain.  No other TLD even comes in at a close second place!