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The Death Of The China Blog Has Been Greatly Exaggerated. The Eight Leading China Blogs By Readership.

By Dan Harris on Posted in Recommended Reading

Received an interesting email the other day from a loyal reader complimenting us for having maintained our “Alexa ranking” through the “downturn” in blog readership. I then checked our Alexa ranking, which ranking is allegedly based on the number of readers and it looked pretty good, at least as compared with other leading China blogs. I then had one of our legal assistants review the blog rankings of all the China blogs of which we are aware to compare blog rankings for this post.  

I did this because I was mildly curious who is being read and who is not being read and, mostly, to see if there is any correlation between quality and readership. Not surprisingly, there is, in that the most read blogs are all good (I am excluding our blog from this description) though, as you would have guessed, there are some truly excellent blogs that are still wallowing in obscurity.

I also asked her to review whether readership of the leading blogs had, for the most part risen, fallen, or stayed the same. Based on her very quick review, she felt that readership had risen in the last two years for “nearly all of them.” The Alexa number given is the overall rank (supposedly based on readership) of each site, with Google at #1, etc. ChinaSmack has the leading readership at 16,850, Shanghaiist is number 2, at 33,438, M.I.C. Gadget is number 3 at 74,426, ChinaHush is ranked number 4 at 88,637, Danwei is number 5 at 123,281, and this humble little niche law blog is number 6 at 173,628 and China Digital Times is number 7 at 190,051 and China Car Times is number 8 at 209,173. Near as we can tell, these are the only China blogs with a ranking of less than 300,000.

All of these blogs have something to say about China that people obviously want to read and so I urge you to check them all out to see which suit you.

I am not exactly sure what all of this signifies, if anything, but it does make me feel good to know we have so many readers and I will say we love 99.9999% of you.

What do you think?

  • http://www.chengduliving.com Charlie

    Congrats on all your success!

  • Kai

    It’s probably because you don’t read these sort of sites but…
    16,850 – chinaSMACK
    40,555 – MIC Gadget
    74,426 – ChinaHush
    88,637 – China Digital Times
    190,051 – China Car Times
    209,173 – TechRice
    385,407 – ESWN
    I didn’t check all the ones I know but I suspected these sites were definitely under 300,000. I was half surprised but half not that Roland’s wasn’t, since it has had big spikes before but I guess normally doesn’t get a lot of traffic. Alexa doesn’t make it easy to get accurate stats of China blogs that are under larger domains like Global Voices and WSJ’s China Real Time Report or James Fallow’s blog at the Atlantic. Alexa I think shows the stats for the full domain, not separating out subdomains so we can compare “China blog vs. China blog” in those situations.
    That said, Alexa is one of the worst traffic measurement tools available. It’s methods and sampling aren’t very accurate. However, it’s one of the few free tools available.
    There are a ton of China blogs and websites out there and traffic is only one way to determine what is “leading”. You can’t really compare niche blogs like your’s against more mainstream/general/news blogs like Shanghaiist or Danwei, much less a blog like chinaSMACK which is arguably niche as well but specifically posts material that is already proven to get eyeballs in China and thus has a strong likelihood of doing the same for non-Chinese audiences as well. Traffic isn’t everything, it’s more important to be the one website people would go to and recommend for your topic. China Law Blog, I think, does a good job for its topic and why I’ve recommended it often before (as well as Stan’s ChinaHearsay)

  • Troy H

    Hi Dan, No surprises that China Law Blog has achieved a high rating in this readership list, I’m a regular reader of the major China blogs and CLB is always a quality read. I for one am glad to hear that blogging in China is alive and well, as I’ve recently been trying to get my own China blog off the ground.
    If you’ll excuse this blatant plug, the blog I’ve been developing is called http://www.chinamarketinglab.com. China Marketing Lab is a niche blog, dedicated to exploring the latest marketing trends in China. I started it last year, and only managed a measly three posts, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to write more this year, I obviously hope to be posting a lot more.
    To give you a flavour of the range of areas I aim to cover, I intend to span the key marketing disciplines as well as general ‘China trends’ for those hard to pin down topics. I’ll use this as a framework and then see where the project leads me.
    Feel free to take a look, I’d welcome any feedback.

  • http://www.east-west-connect.com Tait

    Alexa is a very poor way of measuring traffic as it only measures traffic from people that are using an Alexa plugin. Usage of those plugins is not steady across different demographics. Those that wish to manipulate it, can do so.
    From watching the traffic trends on my own websites, I can see that Alexa is often way off.
    Nonetheless, Alexa stats are better than nothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if ChinaSMACK is indeed the most read China blog.
    Blogs that are tailored to those that are more likely to be using an Alexa plugin, such as TechRice and MIC Gadget, are most likely considerably overrated by Alexa in comparison to other blogs. That’s just a guess though.
    I’d be willing to bet that ChinaLawBlog actually gets more views than 3 of the blogs on the list.

  • http://www.bystandermedia.com Paul Maidment

    Just for the heck of it, I ran the set of blogs above through Compete, which measures only U.S. internet usage. How much that reflects these blogs total readership is anyone’s guess. This re-ranks them (for December 2010) as follows:
    ChinaSmack 25,773
    Shanghaiist 76,444
    MIC Gadget 83,797
    China Digital Times 107,008
    ChinaHush 115,181
    Danwei 116,963
    China Car Times 137,220
    China Law Blog 165,167
    Given Compete claims to rank 3 million sites and those eight blogs will have disproportionately large non-U.S. audiences, those rankings strike me as quite impressive. Some other random data points. Compete says ChinaSmack had three times the number of monthly unique visitors that Shanghaiist got. ChinaSmack, MIC Gadget, China Car Times and China Law Blog were the only ones to have had more visitors in December 2010 than they had in December 2009 (and China Law Blog the only one to have tripled its U.S. audience).

  • Charles

    Some significant China business sites missing there. There is no correlation between ChinaSmack readers (the National Enquirer of China blogs) and business sites. And as has been mentioned, Alexa is unreliable, and ChinaSmack has a largely low end readership. There are other business sites not mentioned that may also have good quality readers.

  • average waiguoren

    regardless of the yardstick used, your blog is of highest quality, which is why i read it.

  • Prince Kuo

    This is b/s. English language blogs have a minority readership in China, while the top blogs are in Chinese and attract millions. The original sentiments “death of China blogging” were geared to Internet censorship of China blogs. The article has been appropriated by the author to discuss his own level of readers. Alexa? Come on, there’s no way this is a serious analysis.

  • Kai

    I’m pretty sure Dan was referring to (and many of us understood) English-language blogs about China. Of course there are much larger Chinese-language China blogs.

  • http://www.chinacartimes.com Ash

    Glad to see that China Car Times is still rocking. 2009 was a so-so year, but its quickly edging back to its 2008 peak.

  • http://www.muondo.org muondo

    wonderful blog!

  • Article Tracker

    Whoever said the China blogs had died was wrong. All that has died are the blogs nobody ever read. Seems the most popular ones like yours Danwei, and Shanghaiist are becoming ever more important and getting more and more readers.

  • Rayson

    I too do not think the China blog has died. It has just evolved due to changes in the way we interact with the internet.