In 2014, Coca-Cola started a marketing campaign in Puerto Rico. They put up billboards advertising internet domains with emojis in them. Those who went to the URLs were linked to the Coca Cola webpage and were offered a chance to win an emoji domain. This was the first time this type of domain was put into the spotlight. The novelty caught people's attention and as a result, Coke made massive profits.
Other successful companies use emoji domains for advertising. Ray-Ban owns xn--gy8h.ws, also known as the sunglasses emoji. 🃏.ws (the joker card emoji) is owned by the MGM casino in Las Vegas. ✈🎰💸.ws belongs to Norwegian Airways. Celebrities are in on the trend too:💄.ws (lipstick emoji) is owned by supermodel Bar Refaeli.
Most top tier domains like dot com or dot net refuse non latin characters in their domain names to prevent potential phishing attacks. Western Samoa (.ws) and Tokelau (.tk) are currently the only places in the world that allow emojis in domain names. This makes every emoji domain particularly unique and rare.
If you own an emoji domain, you can also have emoji e-mail. Here's an example with the tomato emoji:
This isn't practical because many major e-mail providers (I'm looking at you, gmail!) block all e-mails coming from emoji domains, but it is really neat regardless.
Emoji domains have their downsides. You can only see the emoji if you access the page from your phone or from a browser that displays emoji, and famous browsers like Chrome often do not. If you access it from most browsers, the emoji will be translated to punycode (which looks like a random jumble of letters) instead. Users trying to access your page from their computer will have to either copy paste the emoji from somewhere or enter the punycode version of it into their URL bar, which is inconvenient. Search engines have trouble indexing emoji websites. This should be fixed once more attention is drawn to this type of domain.
While emoji domains aren't very practical for now, they are really unique and might catch on in the future. Would you buy one?
Nice post. Thanks for sharing. I know the guy who registered the smiley face emoji domain when Coca-Cola let it expire. He also owns one of the most recognized hieroglyph domains, which interestingly has a .com extension.