Let’s put it right out there: the media in China is HUGE! Seriously, AARP magazine – said to be the world’s largest magazine at over 22.5 million circulation – still probably reigns supreme. But Sports Illustrated and Cosmo at 3 million each would just be a walk in the park for these people. There are nearly 9400 different print magazines in China (including many of our well known titles from America redone Asian-style), not to mention the 4000 online-only publications.And USA Today, America’s largest daily at 2.2 million circulation, doesn’t even come close to China’s People’s Daily at 3 million prints every day. Can anyone say deforestation? Someone get a tree-hugger over here pronto!
China and America rival each other in the number of internet users, at over 210 million each. Talk about your world-wide web. The major difference is that the US has pretty much reached its plateau at just over 70% usage in the country. China is still growing by 72 million users a year. To put that is perspective, that’s an average of 200,000 new internet users (or the city of St. Louis) every day.
For online editions, I guess they’re not that different. The People’s Daily and USA Today Online both have about 2 million unique visitors daily to their homepage. But the People’s Daily also comes in 10 different languages. Yep, 10. I feel so unilingual. Just the community section of People’s Daily is larger than the whole Missourian Building, and there are 80 other sections to put online. Can you imagine the type of editing that must go on in these publications? One thing the US tops China on is advertising revenue (beating them at about $1 billion). But the majority of Chinese papers have a lower ad ratio, giving more editorial content to the reader. Not a fair fight.
Oh, I almost forgot. How do you get the news to reach so many people spread out so wide? It’s not by TV like the US, although they do have a massive CCTV network. Nope, it’s by cell phone. Some US papers are starting to go this route with flash updates. But with a monthly mobile increase of 7.2 billion, Chinese media has seen the light. And they like it, with the revenue from mobile news reaching 805 billion RMB in 2007. I’m just awestruck at the size of things over here.
Anyways, more to come on what we’ve done.
