A Brief Guide to China’s Media Landscape – February 2014

by Rachel Wang on February 20, 2014

The table below shows mainland China’s most important websites, newspapers, and broadcast news organizations, together with numbers for website traffic, circulation and audience.

The numbers are guesstimates based on media reports, listed companies’ public filings, media advertising rate cards, Alexa.com and Danwei interviews with media insiders. Like all numbers in China, they should be taken with a pinch of salt, for reference only. This list is updated every three months.

The major changes since the last version of this report (published in November 2013) are continued growth of Internet users, and the rise of the mobile device as the most common means of accessing the Internet:

“The number of Internet users in China had hit 604 million as of the end of September [2013], with mobile phones becoming the favored means of accessing the web, the State Internet Information Office announced”according to the China Daily.

2013 also witnessed a significant downturn of activity on Sina Weibo (often glossed as “China’s Twitter”). According to recent reports released by China Internet Network Information Center, 22.8% netizens reduced their usage of Weibo, including visits from mobile devices. In December 2013, there were 196 million mobile phone Weibo users, which is 5.96 million fewer than at the end of 2012. The decline is widely blamed on several factors, including the rise of Tencent’s WeChat messaging and mobile app service; government censorship, especially the”Big V Crackdown”; too much advertising and commercial “noise” on users’ Weibo feeds; and a lack of innovation from Sina (see this article for more on the factors behind the decline).

Internet
Sina Weibo	Microblog	Over 500 million registered users/25 million active users daily
Sina.com.cn	News portal website	40 million IP visitors daily
Tencent Weibo	Microblog	about 540 million registered users/220 million active users monthly
Tencent Qzone	Nickname SNS, blogs, home pages	620 million active users monthly
Tencent WeChat	Mobile text & voice messaging, friend networks	272 million active users monthly
QQ.com	News portal website	51 million IP visitor daily
Baidu Post Bar	Forum and Q&A	over 10 million registered users and over 200 million monthly active users
Baidu Search Engine	Search engine	over 80 million IP visitors daily
Taobao and T Mall	Online mall and C2C ecommerce	over 67 million IP visitors daily (combined); over 1 trillion RMB sales in 2012
Youku & Tudou	Companies have merged; video sharing and viewing, including TV shows	youku: over 10 million IP visitors daily tudou:over 1.26 million IP visitors daily
Douban	Interest based, nickname SNS	79 million registered users and over 200 million active users monthly
Renren	Real name SNS	184  million active users
Sohu	News portal website	25 million IP visitor daily
Netease	News portal website	16 million IP visitor daily23 million unique visitors daily
iFeng	News portal website	11 million IP visitor daily
Caixin	Financial business & politics news	one of the leading websites in finance, 153 thousand IP visitor daily
Yicai	Financial & economic news	one of the leading websites in finance, 54 thousand IP visitor daily
Print Newspapers
Reference News 参考消息	Newspaper	3.4 million copies
People’s Daily 人民日报	Newspaper	2.8 million copies
Global Times 环球时报	Newspaper	2 million copies
Southern Weekly 南方周末	Newspaper	1.7 million copies
New Weekly新周刊	Magazine focusing on current events and lifestyle	310,000 copies
Southern People Weekly 南方人物周刊	Magazine focusing on interviews	200,000 copies
Radio and TV
China National Radio 中央人民广播电台	Radio	Over 700 million listeners
CCTV 中国中央电视台	State television broadcaster in mainland China with mutiple channels	200 million to around a billion viewers
HunanTV 湖南卫视	Top provincial satellite TV station focused on entertainment programs	65 to 800 million viewers