In case you hadn’t noticed, the world has caught emoji fever.
An estimated 6 billion of the tiny cartoony icons are sent daily, according to numbers tabulated by Swyft Media. But that was two years ago, so the tally could be unimaginable by now.
According to a new survey of 1,000 Americans, most respondents love to use emoji and would use more if only they were available. The survey should be taken with a grain of salt as The 2017 State of Emoji National Survey was conducted by MoJiLaLa, a self-proclaimed “Netflix of emoji,” so it has a dog in this fight. Still the results—for the most part—ring true.
A large majority of those participating replied they’re not happy with the current supply of emoji, with 36% wanting a wider selection in general and 21% wishing for emoji on breaking news topics, like politics and sports. Approximately 13% said they would like to see more racial diversity in emoji.
Nineteen percent said they’d be willing to pay to access unlimited emoji, a trend that MoJiLaLa, which offers some 15,000 emoji, would probably encourage.
Some other findings: A whopping 86% of those surveyed said they use emoji regularly; that number jumps to 92% among millennials aged 18 to 34.
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Facebook (FB) is fertile ground for emoji use with 25% of those surveyed saying they use it to post emoji. After Facebook comes Android text messaging (22%), Snapchat (14%), Apple (AAPL) iMessage (11%), and plain old email (10%).
The survey itself was conducted predominantly via Android smartphones and secondarily on iOS devices with some desktop users, a spokeswoman said. That means these numbers don’t include Americans who aren’t on smartphones or computers much or at all—and believe it or not, there are some.
As for using emoji at work, a surprising number of respondents—38%—said such use is inappropriate in a business setting; 21% disagreed, describing such use as fun.
When people were asked specifically about use of emoji on internal work chat systems, the numbers were “suspiciously low,” the spokeswoman said. Just 1% said they use emoji on Slack, the popular workplace messaging product. And 2% said they use emoji in work-oriented chat systems generally.
That is suspicious: As a disclaimer, Coins2Day‘s staff Slack feeds are jam-packed with stock and custom emoji. (Maybe we are an exception to the rule, but I suspect not.)
For more on emoji, watch:
Another finding of note: Nearly one fifth (19%) of those surveyed said they use emoji to express emotion, and 11% said emoji do a better job of that than words. Oh, and 13% of respondents said they’d like to see more “sexy” emoji.