Thursday December 2nd 2021
The domain name is ❤️.gg, or xn-qei.gg for all you punycode fans. It's the single largest emoji domain purchase I've made, but I think it's a solid investment. I want to explain why.
Going way back to the start, I purchased about 300 .kz emoji domains and started Mailoji, an emoji email address service. Since then, I've expanded Mailoji, and bought .fm, .to, .je and .gg emoji domains over the past 9 months.
In that time, Mailoji has grown slowly, and I've got a feeling for what's popular. Recently it's been .gg domains - it's a nice extension and popular amongst gamers. The .gg registry is strange in that only old emojis work with it, like a basic 😊 or ☀️. Currently I own a lot of these .ggs (perhaps 80% of them).
Did you know there's two red heart emojis? One is a heart suit (like on playing cards) and the other is the classic red heart. They basically look identical - but I have owned heart-suit.gg for a while now.
One day got an email out of the blue from the owner of ❤️.gg (the new one), saying that a lot of Mailoji customers were sending emails to his servers because I was falsely listing his domain on my website. I wasn't - it was the old heart-suit.gg emoji.
After cleaning up the confusion, he asked if I was interested in purchasing ❤️.gg anyway - his asking price was $5,000.
He sent over some traffic stats for the domain, and wow - they were pretty good. Much better than I'd ever seen on my current emoji domains. By forwarding this traffic to Mailoji, I have a nice stream of people I know are interested in emoji domains, and much more likely to purchase an emoji email address.
Traffic was good, .gg was popular, and the heart emoji is universally known/liked. I also wanted to add it to my collection, because I'm weird like that.
Also, I'd noticed gradually rising prices on emoji domain auctions. The .to emoji domains have gone insane recently.
All this lead to me wanting this domain - and, after a bit of negotiation, I got the price down to $3K and made the purchase. The seller turned out to be a really nice guy from Romania, who'd made quite a lot on domain investments.
Now I have it - I'm interested to see if my theory about traffic is correct. $3K is a lot for me, and I drained most of the tiny projects bank account on this purchase - but I'm confident about this investment.
It's so weird. There's literally no one I could seek advice with about this decision, it's based purely on gut feel - I could be completely wrong.
I will report back if it works!