Emoji are part of the web culture since their creation in 1999 by Shigetaka Kuritaqui. At first, they were created specifically for Japanese cell phones, then they went under some transformations to be adapted to the Unicode. Nowadays, we find them everywhere, on social medias, SMS and even on marketing campaigns. These emoticons are going to enter the Museum of Modern Art in New York in December 2016. But did you know that you can create a domain name only in emoji?
❤️??.ws
In fact, Godaddy recently announced the launch of a new search engine, dedicated to the emoji domain names. Can you imagine a shoe e-commerce ???.ws or ??☀️?.ws for a weather forecast website? And for coffee addicts (as many in YouDot) ☕️☕️☕️.ws … We clearly see the potential of emoji for brands communication or e-commerce.
Thus, in 2015 the airline company Norwegian Airlines created a URL with emoji in shapes of a plane, a bank note and a slot machine: www.✈️??.ws. The idea was to highlight a new connection between Copenhagen and Las Vegas.
Although this might seem weird, web address using this kind of domain names are compatible with desktop and mobile browsers. In fact, they are using the Punycode, a coding system used by internationalized domain names. This method transforms emoticons in ASCII characters, it is the same process that the one used to encode the accented characters, which are used for domain names since a few years (avoiding typo squatting).
Although this might seem original, web address using this kind of domain names are compatible with desktop and mobile browsers. In fact, they are using the Punycode, a coding system used by internationalized domain names. This method transforms emoticons in ASCII characters, it is the same process that the one used to encode the accented characters, which are used for domain names since a few years (avoiding typo squatting).
Even if the idea seems original, she is barely new. According to Fortune.com, the first emoji domain name was registered in 1995 : it was a little snowman ☃.com
Follow the emoji trend
What you should know is that, right now, you can only register emoji domain names with the .WS extension (originally the national TLD of Samoa Islands). The .WS TLD is, at this date, the only extension offering the possibility to use emoji in the domain name. According to the ICANN current charter, only numbers and letters can be combined to create a domain name.
Nonetheless, if emoji domain names become successful in the future, maybe it will be possible to register domains in other extensions. Otherwise, we will need to watch out these domains and try to snap them when they will come to expiration.
One of the critics we could make against the use of emoji in a web address is that it is more dedicated to a mobile browsing, as keyboard don’t have emoji yet, and the display of emoticons on a desktop is not easy. Little trick for mac users : press CTRL + CMD + SPACE to display the list. Or buy the next MacBook Pro with the touch bar !
What do you think of emoji domain names ? Is it only a passing trend, or can we foresee a marketing potential, even a SEO one ?
Rather ? or ??