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dotFM offers $1.1 million stash of emoji domains

Kevin Murphy, April 16, 2018, Domain Registries

BRS Media has started selling emoji domain names in its .fm ccTLD, and some of the more commonly used ones are quite pricey.
While a vanilla emoji will go for the standard .fm price of $95.95 a year when bought from dotFM’s web site, the company has set aside about 500 domains as “premiums”.
These reserved domains start at $995 for the first year, running to $4,995, according to a published price list.
In total, dotFM is sitting on a stash of premiums worth, it reckons, over $1.1 million in the first year.
The current Unicode standard supports 2,789 emojis, so if BRS manages to sell the lot it’s looking at a not-bad $267,000 a year in renewals.
Kicking off the registration process appears to be as simple as copy-pasting an emoji into the dotFM search box, but that may not work at its partner registrars.
It’s worth noting that emoji domains are what you might call an acquired taste, mainly attractive for their novelty value and not the kind of place you’d want to run your primary web site.
They’re also basically banned by ICANN policy in the gTLD space.
.fm is the ccTLD for Micronesia which BRS has been running as an open, if niche, TLD for the radio market for the last 20 years.

Emojis coming to another ccTLD

Kevin Murphy, January 24, 2018, Domain Registries

dotFM is to make emoji domain names available in the .fm ccTLD it manages.
The company said today that it’s currently taking expressions of interest in ‘premium’ emoji inventory, and that such domains will be registerable at an unspecified point in future.
It’s published a list of single-emoji domains it plans to sell.
Emoji domains “will be available based on Unicode Consortium Emoji Version 5.0 standards using single code point; and allowing a mix of letters and emoji characters under the top-level .FM, as well as the dotRadio extensions, .RADIO.fm and .RADIO.am”, dotFM said.
Very few TLDs allow emojis to be registered today.
The most prominent is .ws, which is Western Samoa’s ccTLD, marketed as an abbreviation for “web site”.
.fm is the ccTLD for Micronesia, but dotFM markets it to radio stations.
As ccTLDs, they’re not subject to ICANN rules that essentially ban them contractually in gTLDs.
Emojis use the same encoding as internationalized domain names, but do not feature in the IDN standards because they’re not used in real spoken languages.
Emoji domains are usually considered not entirely practical due to the inconsistent ways they can be rendered by applications.