Would Chinese people pay for prestigious vanity email?

[bobbarato]

Let's say the owner of wang dot com sells email addresses and perhaps web addresses like jian@wang dot com and either/or jian dot wang dot com or wang dot com/jian.

Anyone know of domains being used like this? Could charge a premium or even auction off addresses.
(there is a service called realnames dot com but they don't seem very popular, successful and with few Asian names. They charge $35/yr for 10 gig email space.)

I wonder how long/hard it would be to find someone to pay $1000/yr for x@LLLL dot com? That's $37k in annual rev all by itself. The rev (lower price but more inventory) for LL and LLL dot com = comfortable retirement!
Perversely, charging an even higher price could make the service be even more prestigious!

One could just offer an email forwarding service instead of hosting actual email accounts and make life even easier.

Is this doable?

 

[Kate]

Not many people pay for E-mail service, even for vanity addresses. They expect it to be free like gmail.

You want to charge 1K/year ? That is a lot of money. Who's going to pay that ?
It's not a business model that I know has been proven. For $50 maybe you'll get a few clients and if you offer good features and outstanding service let word of mouth do the rest.

 

[bobbarato]

Not many people pay for E-mail service, even for vanity addresses. They expect it to be free like gmail.

You want to charge 1K/year ? That is a lot of money. Who's going to pay that ?

I know it is a lot of money but I'm looking for vain, rich people who will spend $1000 on dinner without blinking. I just need a couple of hundred customers to make it interesting.

China has relatively few family / last names which is the reverse of the West. Quite a few of these names are out of circulation as .com, so a family name.com is very rare and hopefully novel.

I've got one of these names (.com) and am looking for a way to use it besides just selling it so it's low cost to try. I'm thinking of trying with offering only XX@LLLL . com at first. One other consideration is that Chinese (many Asian) full names are Familyname+firstname.

 

[Kassey Lee]

In the US, Chicago.com tried it for a while before it was sold. Not sure if they are still selling email addresses now. Power.com even tried to sell to the rich as vanity email addresses, but I have not heard of any success. It's likely Google or Microsoft or some other big names will start giving away domain names plus whole package of email, website tools, storage in exchange for ad placement and upgrade fees. Then, targeting the average person on the street may be difficult when they can get something all free.

 

[TRY]

The unexpected success of chicago.com's vanity email offerings is the reason it was bought soon afterwards, imo. The following is a link to the chicago.com story at dnjournal. Here
http://www.dnjournal.com/articles/companies/2012/atidentity.htm

 

[bobbarato]

Thanks for the link Brandingtheweb. One of the sites mentioned, nyc.com, charges $99/month with 10% off for 2yr and 20% of for 3yr. Yes ~$100 a month. I gotta go lie down...

 

[TRY]

Thanks for the link Brandingtheweb. One of the sites mentioned, nyc.com, charges $99/month with 10% off for 2yr and 20% of for 3yr. Yes ~$100 a month. I gotta go lie down...

Your welcome, I think it would be best to have more than just one tier of pricing. Maybe free, General, and premium depending on the quality of the name@.