Blanco GmbH and SPIEGEL terminate top level domain names.
Two companies have notified ICANN that they no longer wish to operate their dot-brand top level domain names.
Blanco GmbH is a kitchen company that sells faucets and sinks. It is terminating the .blanco top level domain name.
Publishing company SPIEGEL-Verlag Rudolf Augstein GmbH & Co. KG separately informed ICANN that it wishes to terminate .spiegel.
Neither company appears to have used their top level domain names other than to create the mandatory nic.TLD website.
Both of the companies only applied for one domain name, so this marks their complete withdrawal from the new TLD program.
A complete list of companies to withdraw top level domain names is here.
Looks like that brings the total up to 40 by my count. You follow this more closely than I do, but I believe for a .brand there’s a $15K min annual registry fee even if they only have the one domain.
Great move if they aren’t using them imo, no reason to throw good money after bad.
39
.boots is listed twice
.Brand has been a bust, almost no usage.
Sony dropping .xperia is a good move.
Sony should be basing everything off of .Sony
So instead of .xperia, it should be xperia.Sony with everything crossing back to something like home.Sony or search.Sony, providing customers a unified brand.
Sony has international reach with a large range of products, so a .brand could be a cost effective approach to their branding needs.
A smaller company wouldn’t see the same potential benefits beyond that of holding a simple status symbol which has less impact on the consumers awareness as other .brands are not being fully utilized.
If a company isn’t using their .brand by now, or hasn’t got a plan to do so in the near future, then a .brand isn’t for them.