Report: China Internet users double to 17 million

BEIJING (Reuters) -- The number of Internet users in China nearly doubled to 17 million in the first half of this year, a semi-official organization that monitors the industry said.

There were 8.9 million Chinese Internet users at the end of last year, but the number leapt to 16.9 million by the end of June, the survey by the China National Network Information Center (CNNIC) showed.

The Web has boomed over the last two years in China, propelled by a surge in computer sales and an incremental drop in telephone and Internet access fees.

While many industry executives and analysts did not dispute the usage figures, they said a separate portion of the survey that ranked the popularity of Web sites was based on flawed methodology and therefore unreliable.

CNNIC, a non-profit organization responsible for registering Chinese Internet domain names, bases the Web ranking on votes cast by users rather than on actual monitoring of Web use.

CNNIC has admitted the system is vulnerable to fraud by Web sites, which sometimes employ underhanded tactics, such as e-mail campaigns and duplicative votes, to attain higher ranks.

"CNNIC is really just a popularity vote," said Louis Boswell, chief operating officer of Interactive Audience Measurement Asia Ltd (iamasia), a startup in Hong Kong which recently began tracking Web use in China.

Some Web companies have run ad campaigns urging Web users to vote for their Web site.

"I think it's politically engineered," said a top executive at one China-based Web portal. "They don't know which votes are valid and which ones are not."

The survey listed Sina.com.cn, the mainland Chinese portal of Sina.com Inc as the most popular, followed by sites run by Sohu.com, Netease.com and Yahoo!

Chinadotcom's flagship site, www.china.com, was ranked ninth.

Iamasia is expected to release its own ranking, based on software which tracks Internet use of a sample population of several thousand volunteers, in August.

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