I am building a network of money sites which will be country specific. I am just trying to assess if an authority site would bring in more SEO traffic than multiple TLDs. Let me expand on that.

Authority Site

www.megaawesomesite123.com/uk
www.megaawesomesite123.com/italy
www.megaawesomesite123.com/norway

vs.

Different TLDs

www.megaawesomesite123.co.uk
www.megaawesomesite123.it
www.megaawesomesite123.no

I know that a mega authority site is better in terms of ranking other pages when the homepage is authoritative and mostly because of this alone, my money is on the auth site because I don't think TLDs hold nearly as much power.

What do you guys think? Anyone who actually has this sort of network?