How easy would it be to remember that 4399.com refers to a gaming site, or that 92.com deals with car sales, or even that 12306.cn sells train tickets? Difficult I guess… unless you are Chinese!
Look what happens. Remembering a URL made up of characters is easy, as long as those characters make sense – a word, two words, a definition, a sentence, something, my boy! Well, the Chinese remember numbers more easily than Latin characters! For example, the word for internet in Mandarin is pronounced wangluo, which means no relation. So as you can imagine, for the Chinese, especially those without a university education, numbers are something they are more familiar with than the letters of the Latin alphabet, which ultimately make up words that mean nothing to them.
In fact, some companies have exploited numbers by associating them with actions that many Chinese people are familiar with. Did you know, for example, that the number 163 was used whenever Chinese people wanted to go online? Therefore, the fact that 163.com belongs to the internet service provider NetEase should not be surprising. Similarly, Alibaba uses 1688.com which – for some reason – sounds like “yow-leeyoh-ba-ba”…
Source: digitallife.gr
