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Emoji Domain/Website Names Are All The Rage!

Cornelius 0

Up until very recently, your domain/website name had to be numbers and or characters with very few exceptions such as a dash. But thanks to innovative outliers in this industry, you can now acquire a domain/website name using an emoji instead of characters. I’ll not bore you with the technical details, so for now just know that it involves Unicode to ASCII character conversion and the reverse. Below are a few examples of what I’m talking about.

Just for fun as well as an investment, I recently bought the following domain/website name . . . glass of beer, glass of beer, thumbs-up or in Unicode terms: www.xn—xj8ha74d.ws or in emoji terms, the following:

I did so largely because I saw that Budweiser (THE KING OF BEERS) bought a similar domain/website name below:

So, if you input the above characters into the browser on your mobile device, it takes you to the main Budweiser website. Obviously, this takes some thought as there are literally thousands of emoji characters on your mobile device which takes us to reason #1 this is so important; mobile will be everything in the INTERNET of the future.

Now, imagine flying overseas and landing in a country you’re visiting for the first time. You’re not fluent in the language or familiar with its’ offerings. You are tired and hungry, but you just happen to remember this article, so you pick-up your mobile device and start typing in websites, not using numbers or letters but emoji characters, such as the domain/website below . . . pizza, chicken or in Unicode terms: www.xn—vi8hea.ws or in emoji terms, the following:

With location services enabled on your mobile device and someone in the food and beverage industry owning this domain/website name (today it’s mine) you could be directed to a restaurant or food delivery service immediately. This brings-up reason #2 . . . there is an international language advantage of owning an emoji domain/website name as not everyone on this planet currently speaks English nor do they need to, but everyone speaks emoji! Your prospective audience is now GLOBAL, reaching up to 7.5 billion potential customers vs. just 360 million in the USA or 1 billion across the globe who speak English today. It’s a no-brainer!

Finally, I’ll touch on one last important factor . . . reason #3 that emoji domain/website names are and will be so vital to any business. As an executive in any industry . . . let’s use snowboarding as our example, not owning the generic domain/website name along with the emoji website for snowboarding may be short-sighted as your competition might grab it and/or hold it forever. Hopefully, you’ll get an opportunity to acquire this “beachfront” piece of real estate someday, but I’d bet at potentially a much higher cost. If you’re not yet convinced of the ROI involved, just review what your business is currently spending on advertising, marketing and social media over the course of let’s say 5 years . . . do the math and you’ll see that owning the appropriate domain/website names along with the emoji name is a cheap date and one you can no longer afford to ignore.