TLD Guides

In-depth guides on alternative domain extensions: history, pricing, notable sites, SEO impact, and pitfalls to avoid.

Special Coverage

TLD Guides

Sunday, September 6, 2026

.capital Names Financial Positioning—Not Dictionary Premium Theater

Delta Mill→Binky Moon→Identity Digital, ~35.6k zone (Jul 2026), ambition.capital at $9,888—and mid-2026 HTTP checks that split live GP roofs from venture.capital iframes and shriram.capital fiction.

GMO Registry paid $41,501,000 at ICANN's January 2016 auction—then outran .store on registration scale. Mid-2026: ~10M cumulative (GMO), ~4.34M in zone (nTLDStats), W3Techs ~0.4% web share. Verified: nike.shop → nike.com, etsy.shop → etsy.com, mobileweb.shop (GMO case). Delete the old guide's "~1M registrations," unverified $100k sales, and AIO shopping-engine fiction.

.link After Uniregistry: Ownership Confusion, Zone Fiction, and the Shortener Tax

Who really runs .link in 2026, why registration counts flatter the namespace, and why a TLD that means “redirect” carries a reputation cost most roundups skip.

TLD Guides

.capital Names Financial Positioning—Not Dictionary Premium Theater

Recommended

.money Is Colloquial Cash English—Not Banking Trust Theater

.finance Names Financial Services—Not a Banking Charter

.shop: GMO's $41.5M Bet on the Word "Shop" — 10M Cumulative, 4.3M in Zone

More Stories

.link After Uniregistry: Ownership Confusion, Zone Fiction, and the Shortener Tax

.network Is Not .net: Identity Digital's ~111k Names, Web3 Infra Roofs—and a 1985 History That Never Happened

.world Sells Global Scope You Still Have to Prove: ~677k Names, world.org Skipped the Suffix, and hello.world Is a Lander

.studio: Identity Digital's Workshop Label—~194k in Zone, Seven Verified Roofs, Broker Mad Libs Dead

.media: Fortune Media Skipped the Industry Noun—airport.media Proves Mid-Market Agency Roofs

.digital Puts Transformation in the Hostname: Identity Digital Canonicalized It, ~539k Names, and tech.digital Is a Broker Lander

.agency: Identity Digital's Service-Firm Label—~120k in Zone, Five Verified Roofs, Six Brochure Names Dead

.mobi: The Mobile TLD Tim Berners-Lee Warned About — 964K Peak, Identity Digital, and a Namespace Responsive Design Killed

.biz: The Business gTLD Nobody Picked — 2M Peak, GoDaddy Registry, and a Zone Still Shrinking

.cloud Puts Infrastructure in the Hostname: Aruba's Registry, wp.cloud's B2B Canonical, and Why Engineers Still Pick .io/.dev

.name: ICANN's Personal Namespace That Never Scaled—and Verisign Is Ending the firstname.lastname.name Era

.ai: Anguilla Owns the Letters, Identity Digital Runs the Register — and ai.com Is Not the Same Thing

.com Is Verisign's Monopoly Rent on the Internet's Default — 166.6M Names, a 7% Cap, and $10.97 Incoming

.net Is Verisign's Shrinking Sidecar: 12.5M Names Stalled While .com Grows — and Wholesale Now Costs More

.org Is a Trust Lease Without a Price Ceiling — 12M Names, a Blocked $1.135B Sale, and $11 Wholesale

.app Was HTTPS-Mandatory Before Your First Visit — HSTS Preload Baked Into Chrome, Not a Checkbox

.art Is Infrastructure, Not Instagram: WHOIS Provenance, Real Museum Roofs, and the Renewal Cliff

.asia Is a Charter Gate, Not an SEO Shortcut: DotAsia, CER Rules, and What Google Actually Does

.blog Puts the Genre in the Root Label

.cc: Verisign's "Next .com" That China Read as 商业公司—Not Cocos Islands Commerce

.club Is Membership English That Platforms Borrow

.co Is Colombia's ccTLD Selling Itself as .com's Missing Letter — gccTLD, Typo Tax, and the 2025 Registry Handoff

.de Wins Germany's Free-Choice Poll—After .cn Took the Volume Crown

.design Is Not Identity Digital: GoDaddy Runs the Registry, Ant Design Sets the Ceiling

.dev Was HTTPS-Locked Two Years Before You Could Register It — HSTS, Localhost Collisions, and the Engineer URL

.eu: Europe's Eligibility-Gated ccTLD—After Brexit Deleted 81,000 Names and Google Calls It a gTLD

.fm: Micronesia Rents FM Radio Nostalgia to the Podcast Era

.fund Names the Vehicle—Not the Campaign

.gg: Guernsey Owns the Letters, Gamers Own the Meaning — and Google Still Treats It as a ccTLD

.in: NIXI Crossed 4 Million Names—Google Locks India Geo, and Domain Hacks Are the Side Quest

.info Promised Information, Delivered Spam: 7.6M Peak, Identity Digital, and a Reputation That Never Recovered

.io Rents Silicon Valley From a Sovereignty Dispute: Chagos, Identity Digital, and the Sunset Clock

.la: IANA Says Laos, www.la Says Los Angeles—and google.la Proves Both Meanings

.live Is Present-Tense English That Expires

.ly: English "-ly" Hacks Rent DNS From Libyan Sharia Law—and vb.ly Proved It

.me Is Montenegro's ccTLD, Google's gccTLD, and Telegram's t.me — Not a Personal Branding Brochure

.online Is the Loanword Radix Industrialized

.page Locks HTTPS in the Root Zone—Not in Your Headers

.pro: Licensed Professionals Only Until 2015 — Identity Digital, ~1M Names, and Few Real Roofs

.sh: Four Thousand Islanders, Three Thousand DNS Names—and a Shell Extension the World Borrowed

.site Is a Blank Noun Landlords Prefer

.so: Notion's Real Hostname—and a Mogadishu ccTLD the Old Guide Called "Generic"

.space Is a Homonym With a Price Tag

.store Finishes What the Microphone Starts

.tech Is the Word in the URL: Radix Beat Google at $6.76M, CES Canonicalized It, and IQM Went Public on It

.to: The 1997 ccTLD That Invented Instant Global Registration—and Still Revokes Shorteners

.tv: Tuvalu Rents Two Letters to the Streaming Era—After Verisign Walked Away

.uk: Europe's #2 ccTLD After the .co.uk Handoff—and Nominet's Membership Revolt

.us Drops Below 1.9M: NTIA's Nexus-Gated ccTLD With Mandatory Public WHOIS

.vc Rents Venture Capital From a Caribbean Registry — Saint Vincent, Identity Digital, and the gccTLD Gap

.ws: Samoa Delegated It, GDI Sold "WebSite," Google Genericized It—and MLM Volume Still Defines the Zone

.xyz Splits the Room: Alphabet's abc.xyz vs the $1 Churn-and-Burn Economy