Domain names need to render the same way everywhere to work.
I send out a weekly newsletter matching podcasters with guests for their shows. (If you don’t subscribe, you should.)
The newsletter is powered by MailChimp, and the service has an easy system for inserting emojis in the subject line of your email. I imagine having an emoji or two draws attention to the subject line. For this week’s email, I included a megaphone emoji.
When the email showed up in my Gmail inbox today, the subject line looked like this:
That’s what it looked like in MailChimp, too. Then I opened the email and the subject line looked like this:
Hmm.
If I look at the email on the Gmail app on my iPhone it looks different again:
It’s a megaphone in all three examples but they all look different. This sort of inconsistency is OK for email marketing, but not for domain names.
This is just one of the reasons I believe emoji domain names will remain just a niche marketing gimmick.
It’s only a real problem if you solely use the emoji domain for a business. I don’t think anyone would recommend that. It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. Why not have both?
If an emoji domain is an ancillary marketing tool for the modern and mobile company, then I think they are very good investments.
The megaphone rendered each time you looked at it across devices and gives a fun context to your newsletter. If use used the megaphone emoji on Twitter (has very good emoji integration) it becomes a visual, colourful, image link which stands out among the sea of black and white text. What marketer doesn’t want that ability?
Incidentally, Facebook got rid of their Messenger emoji and now the Facebook emoji are used for both platforms. We might never get to a unified emoji across all platforms but when you’re not just thinking about an emoji domain being the ‘home’ domain for a company the possibilities open up.
I agree that its niche and if they can’t be ‘home’ domains then retail prices are not going to be extraordinarily high but there’s much more to them than a gimmick.
I respectfully disagree with your view.
That would be like saying that Text and Numbers are bad for Domain Names because different Fonts exist.
There is no mistaking that … A megaphone is a megaphone regardless of its Emoji variation.
Just like there’s no mistaking that a letter A is a letter A and a number 1 is a number 1 regardless of which Fonts are used on Domain Names (Online or on Marketing Materials).
As the famous form of Abductive Reasoning states … “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
“number 1 is a number 1 regardless of which Fonts” – Ha!Ha! – not a good example as the number 1 in some fonts is the same as lowercase L and / or uppercase i … 1 l I (in the order described)
I disagree with the original post – there are many letters and numbers that look identical in various fonts, but have not been banned from domain names.
There are also 1000s of unicode characters that look the same as each other, but are technically different – e.g. numerous cyrillic characters are identical to latin ones, but are still not banned.
Additionally, it would be possible to standardise the way emojis are displayed