“Brand TLD: how are .MARQUES domain names used 10 years on?
Among the “New gTLDs” launched 10 years ago, a specific category of Internet extensions has emerged: the “Brand TLD”. Find out how companies are or aren’t using domain names registered in their own Internet extensions.
Also known as “dotBRANDs” or .MARQUE, the “Brand TLD” is defined as such by Afnic in its latest study on the domain name market worldwide:
“Extensions generally correspond to flagship brands, registered by private companies for internal use or extended to their customers and partners.
In 2012, several hundred major brands asked ICANN to create their “Brand TLDs”. Since then, this window of opportunity has closed, and will reopen in 2026, 14 years after the first round of “nTLDs”.
This second round of “New gTLDs” is eagerly awaited by domain name professionals, particularly in the dot-brand category. Nevertheless, it is interesting to examine the actual use of the very first .MARQUES and to learn from their feedback.
How many Brand TLDs are there?
To do this, Solidnames studied (*) the number of domain names registered in each Brand TLD. While statistics alone don’t tell the whole story about the actual use of an Internet extension, they are an important indicator.
Statistical data were collected on the reference website ntldstats.com. The extensions selected are those qualified as “Brand TLDs” by ntldstats.com. However, we have excluded extensions in this category that are open to all, such as Google’s .PAGE. What’s more, the study covers only closed dotBRANDs. Thus, an open .BRAND such as that of French hosting company OVH, with its 75,000 .OVH domain names, was not included.
Under these conditions, 465 .MARQUES were studied. This is lower than the number identified by AFNIC (519 in 2023 vs. 594 in 2019, as we’ll come back to in “dot Brands”). However, it is higher than that identified by another domain name reference site, domainincite.com, which counts 375 in 2024.
Eight .MARQUES with more than 500 domain names registered
Among the “Brand TLDs” studied by Solidnames, eight Internet extensions exceed 500 registered domain names. This represents just over 1% of all .MARQUES.
The Brand TLD with the most registered domain names is German. It’s called .DVAG. Owned by asset management company Deutsche Vermögensberatung, it totals almost 7,000 domain names. The company offers each of its financial advisors a .DVAG domain name, based on the first name-name.dvag.
Deutsche Vermögensberatung also operates another dotBRAND .ALLFINANZ with almost 1,500 domain names.
Also in Germany, Audi (2nd largest Brand TLD by volume) has 1,700 .AUDI domain names. The car brand offers them to its official dealers.
The performance of these German .MARQUES will come as no surprise to domain name specialists. It’s worth remembering that Germany has a strong appetite for domain names. In our latest ranking of extensions, .DE is the leading European country-code extension in terms of registrations. This country-code Top Level Domain (“ccTLD”) has more than 17 million domain names registered.
French .MMA and .LECLERC in the world’s top 5 Brand TLDs
In 3rd and 5th place, there are two French companies with .MMA (1,600 domain names) and .LECLERC (1,150).
The French mutual insurance group, formerly known as Les Mutuelles du Mans Assurances (i.e. MMA), initially applied to fight another potential .MMA. Indeed, mixed martial arts, often referred to by the English acronym MMA for “Mixed Martial Arts”, has had its supporters, as have many other sporting nTLDs.
The mutual insurer has now registered the names of communes as .MMA and redirects them to the local agency (e.g.: la-ciotat.mma to agence.mma.fr/la-ciotat/).
The French supermarket chain also has this naming system, with city names redirecting to the store page on its flagship e.leclerc site (e.g.: pessac.leclerc to e.leclerc/mag/e-leclerc-pessac).
In addition, the Association des Centres Distributeurs E.Leclerc has created many other .LECLERC sites, such as drive.leclerc, location.leclerc, parapharmacie.leclerc, etc…
Other dotBRANDs with more than 500 domain names include the Spanish car manufacturer Seat (a subsidiary of the German Volkswagen group) with .SEAT and its 700+ domain names.
There’s also the American technology company Neustar, accessible via home.neustar.
Finally, .CRS belongs to the Canadian cooperative Federated Co-operatives Limited. It also uses its .CRS domain names in conjunction with the names of local geographic communities to designate the store in the territory.
7% of Brand TLDs have between 100 and 499 domain names
36 .MARQUES are located with a number of domain names between 100 and 499; a respectable statistic.
Google, a major historical player in the “New gTLD” program, has almost 200 .GOOGLE domain names. For example, it redirects gemini.google (the name of its artificial intelligence) to https://gemini.google.com. It also uses .GOOGLE domain names such as pixel.google or tv.google.
In this category, Saint-Gobain Weber has over a hundred .WEBER domain names (164). The French company specializing in the production, transformation and distribution of materials uses them in particular to give access to country-specific domain names (e.g. https://www.fr.weber/ for France).
The American pharmaceutical company “Abbott Laboratories” (393 domain names) uses the same system, with fr.abbott as the address for its website in France.
In the banking sector, French commercial bank BNP Paribas is often cited as an example of the use of .MARQUE domain names. The company has 272 .BNPPARIBAS domain names, including that of its bank, accessible via mabanque.bnpparibas.
British bank Barclays has 136 .BARCLAYS domain names, including home.barclays.
In the automotive sector, Toyota (138 domain names) has opted for global.toyota for its corporate site.
Certify your distribution network with a domain name registered in your Brand TLD
Other car brands have applied Audi’s policy to enhance the value of its distribution network. Lamborghini (245 domain names), for example, uses johannesburg.lamborghini to redirect to the page for its dealer in this South African city on its site, which remains in .COM.
BMW (132 domain names) does the same in Germany, but refers to a real .BMW site (e.g. ratzel.bmw). Ditto for .MINI (191 domain names) also in Germany, with muenchen.mini for example.
Still in the vehicle category, MAN Truck & Bus SE has registered the names of social networks in its .MAN domain names. This allows them to be redirected to the appropriate page (e.g. youtube.man points to the brand’s YouTube channel).
Other major players in the first nTLD program include Amazon. The company uses several of its .MARKS for product sites (e.g. https://calculator.aws – 126 domain names) or smallbusiness.amazon (122).
Another special case is Total. The French multinational producer and supplier of hydrocarbons and other energy sources has exceeded 100 registered domain names, but no particular use has been detected. It’s true that in 2021, Total became TotalEnergies. This “rebranding” is certainly slowing down the use of its .MARQUE domain.
Number of domain names registered by Brand TLD
Some uses of “Brand TLDs” between 10 and 99 domain names
7% of dot Brands are between 50 and 99 domain names. Among them is the giant Microsoft (91 domain names). The company launched the cloud.microsoft site in 2023 for its various SaaS products.
Among French companies, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF) gave the “Brand TLD” its moment of glory with oui.sncf launched at the end of 2017. Indeed, voyages-sncf.com became oui.sncf at that time. This .BRAND domain name benefited from maximum visibility with plenty of advertising. Nevertheless, the SNCF reservation platform changed its name again at the beginning of 2022. As such, it swapped its oui.sncf for a good old .COM with sncf-connect.com.
However, the company still holds sixty .SNCF domain names, such as wifi.sncf for train commuters.
French insurer AXA has a few more .AXA domain names (70), but with no real use apart from a few mini-sites like climate.axa.
Between 10 and 49 domain names, there are 95 .MARQUES (20% of the total). The low number of registrations can also be explained by the fact that a .MARQUE is a private digital territory. Sometimes, a few dozen domain names are enough.
In this category, the florist Aquarelle.com (49 domain names) stands out. It offers dedicated sites for its chocolates (e.g. chocolates.aquarelle) and scented candles (e.g. scented-candles.aquarelle).
SCHMIDT GROUPE has switched two of its sites to Brand TLDs: home-design.schmidt (34 domain names in .SCHMIDT) and ma.cuisinella (13 domain names in .CUISINELLA).
Among French .MARQUES, there are 29 .CLUDMED domain names, including a magazine (lemagazine.clubmed). SANOFI has 19, as for campus.sanofi.
Another major player in the domain name market, GoDaddy has registered 36 domain names in its Brand TLD. It uses some of them for its registry activity (e.g. registry.godaddy) and for its job offers (e.g. careers.godaddy).
When .MARQUES domain names redirect .COM domain names
Several major companies use some of their registered domain names in their dot Brands to redirect visitors to their historical sites.
This is the case, for example, with Airbus (47 domain names). It directs careers.airbus to its jobs page. Apple (46 domain names) redirects applemusic.apple to https://www.apple.com/apple-music/
Bostik (37 domain names) does the same for glue.bostik. Bostik is a French company that creates, manufactures and markets adhesives for construction, industry and the general public. Bostik is part of the Arkema group, but was formerly part of Total (see above).
Finally, the television channel Arte also uses several domain names (13) in its “Brand TLD” for redirects such as so.arte.
62% of .MARQUES have fewer than 10 registered domain names
Can a “Brand TLD” that doesn’t even have 10 registered domain names be considered in use?
There are 124 “dotBRANDs” totalling just between 2 and 10 domain names. In this segment, there are a few French names: Alstom (9, including an active site with customerportal.alstom), Orange (8), SFR (7), Hermès (7), Lancaster (7), Maif (7) and Chanel (5).
Major international brands are also present, including IBM, Jaguar, Lego, Mattel, Nike, Nissan, Nokia, Samsung, UPS, Volvo, Yahoo, Zara…
Finally, 36% of .BRANDS have only one small domain name registered – the one imposed by ICANN.
Among the bottom of the class, Alibaba, Calvin Klein, Gap, Nikon and Visa even find themselves next to Verisign, the over-powerful registry for .COM domain names.
Booking is here too. The accommodation booking site that has done so much publicity for its booking.yeah (an extension that doesn’t exist!) just has a .BOOKING domain name.
Brands that have abandoned their Brand TLDs
In the latest edition on the domain name market worldwide, Loïc DAMILAVILLE of Afnic has clearly understood that .MARQUES are subject to abandonment:
“The nTLD abandonments in 2023 exclusively concerned .Marque, which is hardly surprising since this is the nTLD segment that is most subject to the vagaries of business life (reorientations in the digital strategies of the groups concerned, changes in flagship brands, or quite simply defensive creations finally abandoned)”.
L’Oréal is a case in point. After applying for 15 “new gTLDs”, the French cosmetics company withdrew its .MARQUES or surrendered generic terms it had wanted to monopolize (e.g. .BEAUTY).
As a result, several “Brand TLDs” are stillborn. American clothing retailer Gap has abandoned .bananarepublic and .oldnavy. Fiat Chrysler has sounded the death knell for .abarth, .alfaromeo, .lancia, .fiat or .maserati.
Other companies have sold their extensions (e.g. .monster) to private registries, which have opened them up to all.
British newspaper publisher Guardian News and Media, for example, sold its sister brand .observer to Identity Digital.
Brand TLD annual recurring fees
Keeping your .MARQUE requires substantial annual maintenance costs. These include ICANN’s annual fees ($25,000), those of the Data Escrow, the Technical Registry Operator (TRO) and the company’s registrar.
Paying ICANN $25,000 a year for the past 10 years to have a single active domain name (and one imposed by ICANN), like 36% of .MARQUES, sounds expensive.
At the end of 2023, the Brand Registry Group (“BRG”) wrote to ICANN to complain. The current fixed registry fee of $25,000 per year is too high. It’s true that most Brand TLDs have few domain names, and that there is virtually no abuse.
The BRG would like to see its members’ fees reduced to $5,000 a year, when there are fewer than 5,000 names on the register and no abuse. Wishful thinking.
How can a “Brand TLD” contribute to the traditional management of a domain name portfolio?
Does having one’s own .MARQUE significantly reduce the management of one’s existing portfolio? Not much, it seems.
First of all, too few companies have really taken ownership of their dot Brands to draw any conclusions. If some preventive deposits have certainly been eliminated, it’s mainly because of their lack of interest, their ever-increasing renewal price, or by subscribing to blocking mechanisms.
The anonymization of “whois” makes it impossible to exhaustively reconstitute company portfolios and monitor their evolution.
Some players believe that .TRADEMARK reduces cybersquatting in other extensions. This sentiment cannot be accurately verified.
If the “UDRP” proceedings index is taken into account, Leclerc took more extrajudicial proceedings in 2023 (8) than in the last ten years. The Danish international pharmaceutical company Lundbeck (273 .lundbeck domain names after all) never did as many as in 2024, with 10 UDRPs.
In conclusion, most of the .MARQUES applied for in the first round are little used, if at all. However, a handful of companies have managed to make the most of them, and take advantage of the many benefits offered by a “Brand TLD”.
Future applicants for a dot BRAND in the next round should learn from this initial feedback. Only .BRANDS that are genuinely supported by companies know how to use this dedicated, reserved and secure space.
The advantages of .MARQUES are numerous. A personalized extension identifies the brand on the web and brings confidence and security to Internet users.
If there are no plans to use your Brand TLD, it will gather dust like hundreds of others before it. Dust whose price stings the eyes.
(*) Study carried out on “new gTLDs” qualified as “Brand TLDs” by ntldstats.com, with the exception of those open to third parties. Statistics collected on November 19, 2024.