Although China.com appears to be the darling of Wall Street, the newest survey produced by the China Network Information Center (CNNIC) indicates that China.com’s mainland portal has fallen further behind the market leaders.
Every six months, government-run CNNIC rates the top 100 sites in China in addition to providing other demographic data regarding China’s Net industry.
In this month’s release, China.com fell to 39th place down from 17th, recorded in the January 1999 survey.
In order of popularity, the top ten sites in CNNIC’s survey included: 1. Sina.com’s China portal, 2. Sohu.com, 3. Capital Online, 4. Yahoo!, 5. Netease.com, 6. 163.net, 7. Yahoo! China, 8. China Popular Computer Week, 9. Shanghai Online and 10. 21cn.com.
In another survey question, CNNIC asked Chinese users what site was used as their browser home page and listed the top sixty. China.com did not make it into the results.
However, one of China.com’s competitors pointed out that the CNNIC data was gathered from a volunteer online survey and that around 20,000 users responded which is just under .5 percent of China’s registered users according to the survey’s own data. CNNIC’s report determined that there are currently 4 million users in China, up from the 2.1 million reported in January.
Nevertheless, the CNNIC survey results are consistent with another independent survey conducted by Australian market research firm www.consult which had 11,582 respondents.
On the first day of its IPO on the Nasdaq, China.com Corporation (Nasdaq: CHINA) soared to $67 7/64 per share, over three times the initial valuation of $20.
