A Brief Guide to China’s Media Landscape – May 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. We also use numbers from the biannual reports issued by CNNIC, the state-owned Internet statistical organization (their December report is available here in Chinese only). Like all numbers in China, they should be taken with a pinch of salt, for reference only. This list is updated every three months.

Notes and updates since the last version of this report (published in February 2014):

• Weibo use continues to slow after the company’s IPO; their filings state a daily active user count of 61.4 million, but we believe that it is lower than that;
• WeChat use continues to grow, although not at anything near its blazing speed in 2013. The deletion of a number of popular accounts that published news feeds to subscribers in Marchput paid to the notion that WeChat might replace Weibo as a platform for freewheeling discussion of sensitive matters.
• In December 2013, CNNIC reported that China had 619 million Internet users, including 500 million people who connected via a mobile phone; the number has no doubt grown since then.
• A report by Gartner in January this year stated that China had more than one billion mobile phone users.
• The strict monitoring and censorship of news and social media in the last half year continue with no letup in sight.

Further reading on China’s Internet and media

Danwei Model Workers
Our list of the best English-language specialist websites about China

Wired
The Great Firewall of China (1997)
by Geremie R. Barmé and Sang Ye

The China Story Yearbook series
Behind the Great Firewall (2012); China’s Internet: A Civilising Process (2013)
by Jeremy Goldkorn
Discontent in Digital China (2012)
by Gloria Davies

The Economist
A Giant Cage – A survey of China’s Internet
by Gady Epstein

The Atlantic
“The Connection Has Been Reset”
by James Fallows