.ch was a free, ad-financed, tabloid format, daily German language

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 newspaper

Newspaper

A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

 in Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

, launched on 19 September 2007 and appearing until 4 May 2009. Its name was derived from the Internet country code

Country code

Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this. The best known of these is ISO 3166-1...

 top-level domain

Top-level domain

A top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a...

 .ch

.ch

.ch is the Internet country code top-level domain for Switzerland. It is administered by SWITCH Information Technology Services.The ".ch" domain does not come from the name for Switzerland in any of its national languages; "die Schweiz", "Suisse", "Svizzera" or "Svizra"...

.

With a claimed initial print run of 435,000, .ch was one of the largest daily newspaper in Switzerland, according to 2006 statistics. It was distributed directly to houses in St. Gallen

St. Gallen

St. Gallen is the capital of the canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. It evolved from the hermitage of Saint Gall, founded in the 7th century. Today, it is a large urban agglomeration and represents the center of eastern Switzerland. The town mainly relies on the service sector for its economic...

, Zürich

Zürich

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

, Basel

Basel

Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...

, Bern and Luzern. .ch competed mainly with other free Swiss newspapers such as 20 Minuten

20 Minuten

20 Minuten is a free German language daily newspaper in Switzerland, distributed to commuters at over 150 train stations across the country.The newspaper was first published in 1999 by "20 Minuten Schweiz AG"...

, heute

Heute (newspaper)

heute was a free, ad-financed daily German language, tabloid format newspaper in Switzerland, launched on 15 May 2006, until its final edition on 30 May 2008. It was the second Pendlerzeitung in Switzerland, after the morning newspaper 20 Minuten, being distributed in the evenings, from...

 and the News

News (newspaper)

NEWS was a free, ad-financed daily German language tabloid format newspaper in Switzerland, launched on 5 December 2007 and discontinued on 4 December 2009...

.

The paper ceased publication in May 2009 due to its poor economic performance. All 69 employees were laid off.