Behind Emoji.ad: Why I Collect Emoji Domains

Emoji domains sound like a joke until you type one into your browser, hit enter, and land exactly where you were supposed to go. In that moment your brain does a double take: Wait… that tiny symbol is a full-blown URL?

Emoji.ad started from that feeling. Not from spreadsheets, not from a business plan, but from a simple, almost childlike sense of delight: the web can still surprise us.

From text web to symbol web

The first era of the web was made of long, clunky URLs. Then came search, social, and apps. Domain names faded into the background. Most people never type full URLs anymore, they tap an icon, click a link, or scan a QR code.

But something interesting happened along the way: our online life became visual first. We send reactions, not paragraphs. We compress entire stories into a single symbol: 🔥, 💸, 🎯, 🧠.

Emoji are the new shorthand for attention. They are the smallest unit of emotion, meaning and culture that still feels human.

Emoji domains are where the text web and the symbol web collide. One character that behaves like a full brand.

Why .to, and why an entire portfolio?

I chose .to because it’s short, neutral, and incredibly flexible in English: it instantly reads as an arrow, a direction, a movement: go to this place, send to this destination, pay to this address.

When you attach an emoji to it, something clicks:

• 💸.to feels like the purest expression of “send money here”.
• 🍣.to is obviously about sushi, food, or a restaurant brand.
• 🚀.to screams launch, startup, crypto, or anything ambitious.
• 🏨.to can only be hotels, stay, or hospitality.

The more I looked at these combinations, the more I realised there was a new kind of naming surface here. Not just “fun domains” for hobby projects, but high-signal endpoints for brands, campaigns and creators.

So I did what I always do when I see a pattern: I started to collect deliberately, systematically, with an ontology in mind. Emoji.ad is not just a random basket of symbols. It’s a curated map of categories of human activity:

• 💰 money & finance
• 🍔 food & drink
• ✈ travel & places
• 🐾 animals & nature
• 🎰 gaming & entertainment
• ⚽ sports
• 👗 fashion & lifestyle
• 🚩 country flags & geo
• 🤖 tech, creators & culture

Each emoji .to in the portfolio is a little piece of that map. The collection is my attempt to organise this new “symbol layer” of the web before it becomes noisy and random.

Collecting as design, not speculation

Domain investing has a bad reputation in some circles. A lot of it is deserved: low-effort squatting, forgettable names, random pricing.

Emoji.ad is the opposite of that. I don’t collect emoji domains to sit on them and wait. I collect them because I’m obsessed with interfaces : the thin layers where human attention meets technology.

To me, each emoji domain is a design object:

• It has semantics : what people intuitively understand from it.
• It has geometry : how it looks in a browser bar, on a poster, on mobile.
• It has behaviour : where it redirects, how it’s measured, how it’s used.

When I choose whether an emoji belongs in the portfolio, I ask questions like:

• Could a serious brand build a campaign around this and not look ridiculous?
• Does the emoji compress a clear concept, or is it too ambiguous?
• Would I personally be proud to see this URL on a billboard?

If the answer is “no” to any of those, it doesn’t matter how rare or “cool” the emoji is, it doesn’t make the cut.

Emoji domains as a new kind of brand primitive

Over the last decade, we moved from brand names to handles: @nike, /tesla, tiktok.com/@creator. Those identifiers live inside other platforms.

Emoji domains are different. They’re tiny, but they are still independent internet real estate. You can point them anywhere, change the destination, route traffic, measure conversions, experiment.

I think of them as brand primitives:

• A single symbol you can print on a product, scan on a QR code, shout in a podcast.
• A way to give each campaign, city or product line its own “glyph”.
• A bridge between visual culture (emoji) and infrastructure (DNS).

In that sense, Emoji.ad is a lab. Every domain in the portfolio is a potential building block for the next wave of brand expression on the open web.

Why this deserves a serious approach

It’s easy to dismiss emoji domains as a novelty. Some of them will be. But early on, short .coms also looked like a novelty. So did social handles. So did three-letter ticker symbols on stock exchanges.

My bet is simple: as the web gets more crowded, memorable endpoints become more valuable. Not just for vanity, but for conversion. A person is more likely to type, remember, or recognise a single emoji than a 28-character slug.

And when a major brand adopts an emoji domain, as some have already started to do, they are not just buying a joke. They are buying a shortcut in human memory.

The personal part: why I enjoy this

Collecting emoji domains sits at the intersection of my favourite things:

• Language : how humans name things.
• Design : how symbols live in space, on screens and in cities.
• Systems : how the DNS layer quietly shapes what’s possible.

When I buy 🐢.to or 🎳.to, I’m not just adding another line to a portfolio. I’m asking myself:

• What would be the most elegant project on earth to own this?
• How could a founder, a club, a small team turn this into a living brand?

Sometimes the best use case is obvious. Sometimes it’s weird and niche. Either way, the domain becomes a kind of open question, waiting for the right person to answer it.

What I want Emoji.ad to be

Emoji.ad is not meant to be a warehouse. I want it to feel like a gallery, a place where every piece on the wall has a reason to exist.

That’s why I publish articles like this one, and more practical guides such as “What Are Emoji Domains?” and “Emoji Domains: Practical Use Cases”. This is not just about selling domains; it’s about documenting a small but fascinating shift in how we think about links.

If you’re a founder, marketer, designer or creator and something in this resonates, you’re exactly the kind of person I had in mind while building this portfolio.

If you’d like to talk

Maybe you already have a project in mind for a specific emoji. Maybe you just want to explore ideas and see what would fit your brand. Either way, I’m always happy to talk to people who take naming and design seriously.

You can browse the full collection on the Emoji.ad home page, or reach out directly with a list of domains you’re curious about.

The future of the web will still need search, apps and platforms. But it will also need small, sharp, memorable entry points that feel human and playful. Emoji domains are one experiment in that direction. Emoji.ad is my way of taking that experiment seriously.

One symbol, one story. If you build something meaningful on top of it, the web will remember.