Over the last several weeks I’ve been doing a massive clean-up and re-organization of the site.  What I did was take each category and break it up into smaller sections of similar emoticons.  I did this for several reasons:

Ease of Use

It makes the site much easier to use.  Now that there are over 10,000 emoticons on the site trying to sort through them to find what you want is pretty hard, especially on giant pages like the happy section or angry section. Now they’re broken up into smaller sections with similar style emoticons in each one to make it much easier to find what you’re looking for.  The feedback I’ve been receiving about the changes over the last few weeks as more people noticed has been very positive which is awesome.

Preventing Plagiarism

The updates make it much harder for people to copy our content.  This is something that drives me absolutely crazy.  People will come to this site and copy the entire table of emoticons from each section on this site, put it on theirs and not cite us as the source. People also love to copy everything from this site and put it in iOS and Android apps. Every time I find a new site or app that copied everything from us and is claiming it as their own I get pretty angry.  I especially dislike when people find these sites, don’t know anything about them and then post something like “hey, check out this awesome site I just found”.  They don’t know any better and then these sites get more traffic. Anyways, by breaking up each section into multiple smaller sections people can’t just copy an entire page of emoticons any more.  They have to copy each smaller section or try to piece them together and since that’s more work hopefully people won’t bother.

The Mobile Apps

I haven’t really made any updates to the iOS or Android apps for a long time.  Currently there are about 2,000 emoticons in those apps.  I want to bring all 10,000+ emoticons to these apps but there’s no way people will scroll through such giant lists on a mobile device.  Breaking it up into smaller categories is pretty much the only way to make this happen on mobile.

What’s Next for JapaneseEmoticons.me

I’ve got a giant backlog of probably 200+ emoticons that you guys suggested.  I’m going to get those added to the site next.  I was waiting until I finished organizing everything to make it easier. Next I’m going to start working on the mobile apps again.  I have big plans, I need to update both the iOS and Android versions to have all 10,000+ plus emoticons. For iOS I also want to add a system keyboard with everything. The Android app is a bit of a mess.  Since releasing the app I’ve found out that a lot of these emoticons don’t display correctly on Android.  I’m not entirely sure what to do about this, I’m leaning to just leaving it as is but I’m not sure. I’ve also had three different developers work on that app so I’m sure the code and everything is a mess so I might just have to start this app over.  The Android app doesn’t get much sales either.  I have to check but I’m not entirely sure I’ve even broken even on the money I spent to get that app developed yet which is frustrating. I think I’ve almost got enough money saved up to get a start on the iOS changes at least so over the next little while I’m going to be developing all the graphics for the new app and iOS 9 and then I’ll try to find a developer and get that done. Another idea I’ve had is to add sort of a store to the site.  I won’t be selling anything specifically myself but I’m thinking of finding awesome kaomoji products and posting affiliate links to them.  If someone clicks one of those links and buys something we’ll get a small commission. Hopefully this can help support the site.  Google Adsense revenue has been going down every month for the last year or so and so far I’ve made maybe $5 in PayPal donations and we’re at $11 a month on Patreon (I still haven’t reached the minimum threshold to be paid there yet even) so asking for donations clearly isn’t working.  Nobody seems to be using the Amazon portal either. So hopefully people will be able to buy some cool things and we’ll get a bit of coin to go towards hosting costs and app development.

Conclusion

So that’s where we are with this site right now and those are my plans for the next little while.  Thank you everyone for using the site and for sharing it on Facebook, tweeting about it any telling others about it. If you have any suggestions for new features, new emoticons or anything as well don’t hesitate to send me an email. ( ◞･౪･)