Nielsen forms China joint venture for web rankings

by Staff, Brand Republic 10-Oct-08, 15:30

LONDON - Nielsen Online is to publish website rankings by visits from Chinese internet users after signing a joint venture with Beijing company Zhongqian Wangrun Information Technology.

Zongqian Wangrun owns ChinaRank, which is the only internet company that has permission to publish website rankings in China.

The new venture will be called CR-Nielsen and will be the first company authorised to support the delivery of standardised internet measurement services in China.

To mark its launch, CR-Nielsen released initial findings on traffic to the biggest websites in China. It revealed that Google trails far behind leading Chinese search engine Baidu.com, which had 171m users in the first two weeks of September, compared with 81m using Google in the same period.

Itzhak Fisher, executive chairman of Nielsen Online, said: "With more than 250 million internet users, China represents a significant opportunity for our clients, and there has been a loud call to support this expanding market with high-quality, independent online measurement services."