Whatever happened to Emoji Domains?

When emoji domains exploded on the market a lot of namepros members thought they were the next big ticket to making money. Like a lot of new things there was the initial land rush and even a few extraordinary sales.

The question is where are they today? I cannot remember coming across even a single emoji domain advertised anywhere or even used for commercial purposes.

How many namepros members still own emoji domains and do you expect to make a profit from them?

Who has given up on them and who has lost money on them.

Will they become more useful in the future or will they just fade into oblivion?

Lets discuss and get some feedback from both sides of the coin.

 

The registries and pumpers all laughed to the bank. And the collectors (suckers?) keep looking proudly at their ‘gems’ that’ll be coveted....some day!

 

@MapleDots why are you so suddenly interested in emoji domains - do you want to buy them, or what?

Saying that small joke, ehm ..I am personally not into them. It is because they simply do not pass a radio test! It is very hard to describe the emoji domain verbally....and when you can not speak about it...

 

That is kind of BRUTAL emoji, did not know that exists

 

samthing with crypto LLLL.com and all other trends that fail

 

@CJ6 @Page Howe @Jon Roig @Claim.Club @ tons of others - look at these haters, I think they need a lesson in diversity..

I know Kate 'specially has a secret untapped fondness for emoji domains.



ps. Maple, still waiting for your offer on my 🍁 / ws

 

I know lots of people using them, but not necessarily the 1 character or "premium ones". Many kids (i say kids - teens) use them for links to their social - Instagram is the one my nieces show me and their friends all do, and emoji seem to be passing the parent approval test. It's interesting as these kids are just on the verge or the target "general" spending age consumer. Their opinions matter, in marketing terms - not really spending yet.

That may say something about the future, the near future. If they catch as a social link, they will naturally follow to business. Who knows?

I know I use some of mine, and they are great on my biz card. I had some new cards made that only had the emoji.ws - nothing else, got a ton of visits after that conference (not Namescon! haha, non-domain conference). They are good marketing tools - but I think people get caught up on it having to be a primary website or email address, they are not. I see them as marketing tools.

I have a a few, that I am keeping, because I think they have real value - dont take that as a pitch to buy, it wasn't meant to be, explaining where I see value in the ones I am willing to pay the renewal for.

Just some thoughts, sorry for the ramble.

Brian

 

Sounds real cool... so, tell me, how exactly do I visit, say, www..com, if I ever see such a web address printed on a business card?

 

do you have a smartphone, that has emojis?

Again, they are not primary sites - at least not how I use them. They are marketing tools, a compliment to my primary site, or a promo, a reason for someone to pull out their phone and check out my site. Got to look at what they are really good at vs. they are not .com. But again, was sharing my experience, not pitching you. sorry if it read that way.

 

The problem is that there are soooooo many different emoji packs on different phones.

www..com

If I saw that I would not know what to press on my Google Pixel phone because they have some of the strangest emoticons. I find them so stupid I actually turn them off.

There would have to be some kind of consistency across operating systems that the emoticons were always the same.

 

Seriously, I would not know what to with them them if I had any.
I deal in domain addresses not smiley faces.

It would be different if i owned something like smiley.emo and if you typed it a universal smiley would come up. sad.emo would see a sad emoticon. The current system is just too convoluted to make any sense to me and 95% of the public. That is why I asked..... who is actually putting them to use?

 

No hate here, just asking if anyone has used them or made money.

As far as making an offer on something I don't understand
Hmm, even as an experienced domainer I never took the time to study or understand how to actually use them because I have never seen them in use.






Other than it being a unicode it's still all french to me and I never did learn french

 

Apart from the fact that most people never knew what most of them meant the main problem in most cases was to the right of the dot.

I made enough money on a couple of glyph sales to cover my outlay but that was about it. Much like IDN/ punycode domain names in general.

Probably my best EMOJYS are in my signature.

 

Look it's a big world and people make money with all kinds of names. I know some people love them and some people hate emojis. Maybe there needs to be a distinction between domain names which a lot of the public does not care about and emojis which most people know and use in their social sharing and private text communications.

I think @DnameAgame made an excellent point about they are marketing tools and that's what I always thought, they are for certain campaigns and create awareness.

The point @MapleDots made was also spot on about no universal uniformity, some emojis look so different on different operating systems that it creates confusion.

Lastly .WS hurts the whole thing, I am sorry but most people who are not in the domain bubble have no idea or ever heard of .ws. If emojis were .com I think there would be a much more vibrant market.

Like so many niches there will be those who focus on that niche, know everything, created contacts and relationships the average investor will not know or have access to.

It always come down to is the juice worth the squeeze? You can make a sale, anything can sell, there are lots of outliers, the keys are:

Can you do it consistently?
Are there better ways to spend your money and time?
Does anyone outside your little world care as half as much as you care?

 

Hence an extension like .emo where people would know what it is and a universal typeset across all operating systems so a happy face or sad face has the same look everywhere.

That one I could see being worth a mint. Imagine owning sad.emo but technically we could have thousands of variants but they would have to be adopted by android, apple, chrome, windows etc.

 

Ah, you misunderstood my question as sarcasm. Nothing of the sort. I read it in the spirit you posted. Found your marketing example of interest and was really curious...

I dig QR codes on business cards, in ads... point your smartphone camera at one and wow and behold... a website opens in your phone's browser! Simple, magical

Emojis... well, answering your question, I have a smartphone, have had one for many years, are technically literate and... I have no idea if I have emojis on it

 

If you would like to get your feet wet, I can give you some time to "try before you buy", and whatever you decide, it's no sweat.
We can discuss privately with a couple of nameservers to point at, and practice away.

I think what you'll find is, as a complement to an existing site, for promotional links particularly on mobile, the emojis are easy to click and are unique attention-grabbers. They will target anyone, and in many cases are far less confusing than some really rotten url's out there. Owning your personal emoji to your main site is a matter of strengthening your brand.

Regarding browser consistency with how emojis look and the extensions they use, there really should be no confusion there. If stuff like this confuses people, then I suppose we should all just stick to using one font and forget about putting sites on ccTLDs, because anything outside of the Arial Font Family and it ain't on dot-com, I mean whatever will we do??

re equity78, I agree with dot-com creating vibrancy, but we don't want a monopoly, where 99% of us would lose out on the investment opportunity.

 

Emojis are useful in SMS and online posts but were never meant to be used as domain names.

 

I would buy .com of that ))))

 

I don't claim to understand emoji domain names so have stuck away from them. That is just me, and no reflection on whether the niche can be successful for some domain investors, and I hope some of them will comment on it so we can all learn.

Is there a way to find emoji domain name sales on NameBio? If so can someone post here how to do it. I apologize if the answer is obvious and I just am not seeing it.

Thanks,

Bob

 

Bob, you can filter namebio for .ws extension - then, when you see something like "xn--z8h.ws", that should be actually an emoji domain (at least from what I seen so far)

 

Keep in mind not all of the " xn-- "on Namebio are emoji domains (some are glyphs and some are just word IDNs) and there are definitely domains not listed that did indeed sell.

 

I've asked before if they could show the IDNs as ordinary text with an IDN symbol or the actual IDN url aw well - they could do that and emojis at the same time.

 

True, some ambiguity if you want to describe it or type it from scratch. But:

If someone sends you one as a link to click on it's clear which emoji it is. You can also copy and paste.

My phone autosuggests emoji in text messages - I start to type train and it puts in a train emoji. So actually typing emoji domains could be very fast and easy.

How will they do with voice interaction???