Alexa's top 100 websites in China (including eBay)

We were checking something on Alexa's traffic ranking page today and we noticed a collection of country links. We hadn't seen this before so we decided to check out the most popular websites in China. Alexa says, "This list refers to the most popular sites among users in the country, not sites hosted in the country," but it's important to note that Alexa's traffic ranking, while widely used, are definitely not without controversy. According to Alexa, "Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users." Shanghaiist is not an Alexa Toolbar user — we can't be, because we are not Windows users, and if we were, we wouldn't use Internet Explorer. So, you see the numbers are a little skewed, but for China they might be pretty accurate, since everyone uses Windows and IE. Although we have no clue how many Chinese internet users use the Alexa Toolbar. Anyway, here's the Top 10:

1. Baidu.com: Search engine
2. QQ.com: Portal
3. Sina.com.cn: Portal
4. Sohu.com: Portal
5. 163.com: Portal
6. Yahoo.com.cn: Portal
7. Taobao.com: Shopping/auctions
8. Google.com: Search engine
9. MSN.com: Portal
10. TOM.com: Portal

No real surprises there. Nice to see Google.com coming above the censored Google.cn, which is No. 11.

The Chinese eBay checks in at No. 25, but that wasn't good enough to keep eBay from checking out of China this week. The most interesting thing we've read on that is this message from a more-than-disgruntled eBay China employee:

EBay now abandons China and us, the loyal workers.

I am one of the many disgruntled Eachnet employee. I have suffered through the incompetence of Ebay leaders for many years. I admit I am greedy. I stay for money. But Ebay has screwed up our Company and in China.

Now that they abandon the market through partnership with Tom Online to be announced this week. The final draft of the press release headlines are below.

Not only are they being fooled, they are basically paying bribes to get the deal done. It is comedy and a travesty and should go down as the worst deal ever in Chinese history.