GoDaddy has figured out how to win over millennials.
On Friday, the company, best known as a Web domain registration and hosting service, released a search engine to help customers find and register emoji-based domain names. That’s right—emoji domain names.
This means anyone can now pay to own “🍷🍰.ws” or whatever combination of emoji that’s still available. The domain search engine itself can be found at “❤️❤️❤️.ws” and GoDaddy says that emoji domain names are “100% compatible with all browsers” thanks to a technique browsers use to convert the code behind the scenes. The “.ws” extension, the top-level domain for Samoa, is one of the very few that supports emoji.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day ’s technology newsletter.
“Emojis have exploded in popularity, becoming an essential part of the online vernacular,” GoDaddy senior director of product marketing Theresa McGinness Geraghty said in a statement sent to Coins2Day. “Driven by the rise of mobile internet usage, which now accounts for over 60% of traffic, consumers are integrating emojis into their conversations on social media, messaging and beyond.”
Of course, the company also notes the marketing potential of emoji domains for brands, which some have already embraced. For example, Coca-Cola ran a campaign last year in Puerto Rico using emoji website domains on large billboards. Norwegian Airlines ran a campaign shortly after as well.
For more about emoji, watch this Coins2Day video:
According to GoDaddy, the first emoji domain was registered in 1995.
And to be clear, GoDaddy hasn’t invented these emoji-based website domains—this is merely a search engine to make it easier to find and register available ones. One of the GoDaddy’s employees build the search engine as part of a company “hackathon.”