All the places emoji will take you, emoji urls are coming...

Marketing your company with a clever emoji-based sub url seems to be right around the corner. The ease and efficiency of communicating through emoji, though sometimes used horribly wrong, could be one of the reasons why the characters' influence has sustained over the years. If you thought emojis were just a short-term trendy phenomenon only for millennials, well stick around – emojis are going get even bigger.

First, we take a visit to the museum for a little history.

 The Museum of Modern Art just acquired the original emoji set – 176 little characters made of 12x12 pixels in only six colors. It was Shigetaka Kurita who designed the world’s first emoji set in 1999 for use on the cellphones and pagers of the day in Japan. Soon everyone in Japan was using these little characters to message back and forth. However it wasn’t until 2010, when Unicode’s added them to the universal list of legit characters that the emoji found universal hype.

Above: the OG emojis. Photo cred: MoMa

One year later, in 2011, Apple introduces emoji as an alternative keyboard on iPhone, causing the emoji wave to take off in America.

Soon emojis become a very powerful marketing tool. As we get closer to 2017, the inevitability of our increasing use of emoji seems inevitable. In the past few years, we’ve seen custom emojis shut down the app store, Apple bringing them to the new Macbook keyboard, the simultaneous explosion of mobile traffic with overall emoji use, and companies like CocaCola in South America and Norwegian Airlines in Europe using the .ws domains to launch viral marketing efforts.

That last change is really important as domains are about to get even more interesting. From C|Net, “[GoDaddy] launched a search engine for emoji domains. People can visit the site on their phones, type in a string of emoji and see if the domain is available.” Though right now the big domains (.com or .org) currently don’t allow the use of emoji in their urls, it would seem that it’s only a matter of time.

Think about it: Apple’s new Macbook has brought the Unicode emoji within a simple keystroke for desktop users, mobile web traffic (emoji’s home) continues to trend green, companies like GoDaddy are developing the search capability to find emoji urls, and through the use of the .ws domain, companies are already seeing the success of attracting users to their brands through the use of the emoji url.

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