When registering a new domain and trying to find an available name, people often wonder if the domain name extension really matters. Oftentimes, the domain name you want will be unavailable as a .Com but will be available as a .Info or .Biz. Let's look at two factors, popularity and potential value, to see if the extension is still important.

Just how popular is the .com extension? Look at the chart below based on data from Whois.sc.

The answer is that .Com extension still dominates - 75% of all domains are .Com followed far behind by .Net and .Org, at 10% and 7% respectively. These three domain extensions account for 92% of all domains registered. This suggests that people strongly prefer the .Com extension even when the name they want is available in another extension like .Biz or .Info.

Is it worth it to have a .Com versus the other extensions? To speak to that question, we took 5 random premium domain names and compared their values across the three most common extensions. We used Valuate.com to estimate their values and the results are below:

As you can see, on average the .Com domains listed above are approximately 20 times more valuable than their .Net or .Org counterparts. This is consistent with the most expensive domain ever sold: Sex.com (sold for $10 million) versus the sale price of Sex.net at $454,000 ,which is a multiple of about 22 times. .Net and .Org seem to be equally about valuable.

In summary, .Com seems be king of the domain name extensions. Like in real estate, location is one of the most important factors, and .Com is prime real estate.

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* Source - http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ as of 3/18/2013