A premium email number is sold for 800,000 yuan? What NetEase is applying here is the anchoring effect.

News that premium phone numbers are sold for sky-high prices of hundreds of thousands or even millions of yuan pops up every once in a while. However, have you ever known that there are also "premium numbers" for email addresses available for sale?

Recent reports show that a NetEase email address "0000000000@126.com" is publicly priced at 839040 yuan online, with labels of "permanent buyout" and "no renewal required, lifetime use" on the page.

It is reported that after the reporter of relevant report contacted NetEase Mail customer service as a consumer, a staff member confirmed that the situation is true, saying that the "10 zeros" premium numbers for "126 Mail" and "yeah Mail" are on sale. The staff also introduced that this type of "premium number" belongs to the official "premium number" email service launched by NetEase Mail. Prices vary greatly for different numbers due to differences in digit combinations, lengths and scarcity.

Regarding why an email address can be sold for more than 800000 yuan, the NetEase Mail customer service stated that "premium numbers" are scarce resources, and their prices are determined by the value of the number resources. The platform sets prices according to the specific situation of each number. Not all email addresses are so expensive, and most ordinary email addresses can be registered and used for free. Consumers can make choices based on their own needs.

The reason why premium phone numbers can be sold at high prices is undoubtedly that mobile phone numbers have extremely high universality. Even though VoIP calls such as WeChat Voice are very popular today, they cannot replace the position of mobile phone numbers in the communication field for the time being. Scarcity, identity demand, cultural psychology and investment value are all additional advantages for premium phone numbers, while the fact that mobile phone numbers actually function as "online identity cards" in China is the root cause for the high value of premium numbers.

However, the usage scenarios of email addresses in the domestic market are too limited, and the lack of a broad mass base makes premium email addresses rather awkward.

The difference in the development paths of the Internet between China and Europe and the United States has resulted in email never taking the central stage in China. Europe and the United States turned to the mobile Internet after PCs were highly popularized. Back in the 1980s, email was launched as the initial application of the Internet. With the launch of webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail at the end of the 1990s, email gradually evolved into the main communication method in Europe and the United States over more than two decades.

The architecture of email is completely consistent with the Internet, both of which use general standards and open-source communication protocols, which are completely different from purely highly centralized products such as instant messaging tools and online office software. In addition, the email system and ecosystem are not completely controlled by any single company, which also ensures that email has a huge space for commercial applications. Communication between different commercial entities via email is also the most efficient way.

When instant messaging tools such as OICQ and MSN emerged, Internet users in Europe and the United States had already formed deep habits of using email. In the domestic market, however, the mobile Internet era arrived before PCs were fully popularized. A considerable number of domestic Internet users accessed the Internet for the first time through smartphones rather than PCs, so they directly got used to instant messaging tools represented by WeChat.

Compared with instant messaging software, email, which belongs to asynchronous communication, is undoubtedly inferior to the former in timeliness and immediacy. This also leads to the fact that if it is only used for simple communication, the efficiency of email is far lower than that of instant messaging software, which ultimately prevents the personal email business from further developing in the domestic market.

A very typical example is that "living fossils of online games" that have been active since the PC Internet era such as *World of Warcraft* and *Jian Wang 3* basically provide the option of using email as the account login method, while new games generally no longer support "email login". The lack of a large enough user base makes it difficult for email to sell premium numbers the way mobile phone numbers do.

In this case, why did NetEase Mail launch a premium number with a sky-high price of more than 800000 yuan? As the business that helped NetEase get started in the early days, NetEase Mail is already a very old business, like chicken ribs that are tasteless to eat but a pity to discard. People familiar with large tech companies know that abandoning unprofitable edge businesses has become a trend, but employees in edge business departments will not wait passively, so creating gimmicks has become an inevitable choice.

Although the email business seems to have little room for imagination, this is only when compared with mainstream tracks such as e-commerce, games and social networking. Upon closer inspection, it is not difficult to find that this business can also generate profits. In fact, email is a veritable low-frequency and low-value-added business, but it also has a clear advantage: it is a product with low technical difficulty but extremely high user stickiness.

Since users often bind various account security protection information to their emails, the cost of changing emails is as high as that of number portability for mobile services, which is a typical case of "easy to get on the boat but hard to get off". Although email is indeed a niche product in the domestic market, it also has a considerable user group. Therefore, a good email address also has its value. By pricing "0000000000@126.com" at more than 800000 yuan, NetEase is actually playing a trick of anchoring effect.

While sky-high-priced premium email addresses are unaffordable for most people, it is obviously not difficult to spend a small amount of money to buy a birthday-themed premium number or a custom premium number.

This article is from the WeChat official account "IT-3eLife" (ID: IT-3eLife), written by San Yijun, and authorized for release by 36Kr.