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 will be updated every three months. This version was first published on November 21, 2013.
Update: “The number of Internet users in China had hit 604 million as of the end of September this year, with mobile phones becoming the favored means of accessing the web, the State Internet Information Office announced” on November 29.
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Internet |
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| Sina Weibo | Microblog | Over 500 million registered users/46.2 million active users daily |
| Sina.com.cn | News portal website | 163 million unique visitors |
| Tencent Weibo | Microblog | About 540 million registered users/100 million active users daily |
| Tencent Qzone | Nickname SNS, blogs, home pages | 626.4 million active users monthly |
| Tencent WeChat | Mobile text & voice messaging, friend networks | 235.8 million active users monthly |
| QQ.com | News portal website | 284.1 million unique visitors |
| Baidu Post Bar | Forum and Q&A | Over 200 million registered users |
| Baidu Search Engine | Search engine | Over 72.9 million visitors daily |
| Taobao and T Mall | Online mall and C2C ecommerce | 46.1 million visitors daily (combined); over 1 trillion RMB sales in 2012 |
| Youku & Tudou | Companies have merged; video sharing and viewing, including TV shows | Youku: over 8.53 million visitors daily Tudou:over 2.1 million visitors daily |
| Douban | Interest based, nickname SNS | Over 100 million unique visitors monthly |
| Renren | Real name SNS | 184 million active users |
| Sohu | News portal website | 175 million unique visitors daily |
| Netease | News portal website | 23 million unique visitors daily |
| iFeng | News portal website | 5 million visitors daily |
| Caixin | Financial business & politics news | 79,000 visitors daily |
| Yicai | Financial & economic news | 64,200 visitors daily |
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Print Newspapers |
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| 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 |
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Radio and TV |
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| 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 |