Type Media | ||
Website | ||
Wenxuecity.com (Chinese: 文学城; Pinyin: Wénxuéchéng), literally "Literature City," is a Chinese-language tabloid website targeting Chinese expatriates and people who work and/or study abroad for entertainment purpose. Without its own news reporting staff, it is a site that collects tabloid news, gossips and editorial articles, both concerning China and the world from other sources, without any verification.
Contents
Wenxuecity.com has a broad influence as the largest overseas Chinese tabloid website. It has been mentioned by other media such as the New York Times, BBC, VOA, China News and China Review News.
Censorship
Wenxuecity.com has some level of censorship in its forums. The censorship appears to be based on an unsophisticated keyword filter. For example, politically sensitive words such as FLG (Falun Gong) would be filtered, as well as acronyms that might have slang meanings in Chinese (e.g., a term "SB 180" referring to "Senate Bill 180" will be filtered out because the slang "SB" can mean “a stupid person” in Chinese). External links are filtered out as well. These links include both commercial competitors, e.g., www.mitbbs.com (MIT BBS), and links that are relevant to truthfulness (or falsehood) of stories published. The site has received numerous complaints for shutting down users' accounts for no obvious reasons.
Rankings
According to 2013 data, wenxuecity.com is ranked 2,531 globally and 810 in the U.S. on search engine traffic volume. Every 30 days, the number of average pageviews is over 2 billion, and that of unique visitors is close to 3 million. Within the 3 million unique visitors, over 90% are returning visitors. And about 60% of the total traffic comes from the US, while about 20% are from Canada. On average, they view about 9 pages for each visit and stay on the site for 14 minutes.