A Chinese Tech Media List You Can Actually Pitch

Foreign tech companies ask for a Chinese tech media list expecting a phone book, and the useful version is something different: a map of appetites. Every outlet on this list accepts different things, through different doors, at different speeds — and the difference between a placement that compounds visibility and one that dead-ends is almost always matching the story to the outlet's beat. This is the working version we use, with what each outlet takes, how to get in, and 2026 cost bands.

The Chinese tech media list: national outlets by appetite

36Kr (36氪) is the anchor outlet — founded in 2010 as China's TechCrunch analogue, strongest on startups, venture funding, and new-economy business models. It runs a dedicated project-coverage line (项目报道) for funding announcements, and its enterprise-content acceptance is structured enough to plan against. TMTPost (钛媒体), founded 2012, leans hard tech and deep analysis; it takes product and technology stories with genuine substance. Huxiu (虎嗅) is the opinion flagship — brilliant reach for ideas-led pieces, and the least receptive of the nationals to paid corporate content. Be honest about that one: pitch it earned, with a market-level argument, not a product announcement.

IT Home (IT之家) is the consumer-digital workhorse: high-volume news flow, fast processing, and the most accessible channel placement of the national-tier names — consumer hardware, apps, and gadgets land here reliably. ZOL (中关村在线) and Yesky (天极网) are the veteran digital-media verticals, both effectively product-news infrastructures with mature placement systems. GeekPark (极客公园) covers product and engineering culture; Leiphone (雷锋网) owns the AI and hardware-dev reader; ifanr (爱范儿) covers consumer gadgets with a design sensibility; DoNews and 砍柴网 are the established mid-tier generalists that keep costs down.

The verticals that outperform their traffic

Traffic is the wrong ranking metric for verticals. 中国机器人网 (robotics), CSDN (developers), and the sector-specific sites convert readers who are specialists — a placement in front of five thousand robotics engineers outsells fifty thousand generic impressions when the goal is industry credibility or developer adoption. These outlets price low (commonly $10–$60), accept technical depth gladly, and are almost never on foreign companies' radar. If your product has an industry, its Chinese vertical belongs on the plan; our Chinese media list with current pricing includes the standing vertical inventory alongside the nationals.

The two doors: channel placement versus account platforms

Every outlet above has two entry doors, and they produce different assets. Channel placement publishes your article on the outlet's own news pages — a permanent URL on the outlet's domain, processed in 24–72 hours, priced per piece, and indexed by Baidu readily because it is a Chinese-language page on a Chinese domain. Account platforms (自媒体号 systems, including 36Kr's author platform and the portal equivalents) are self-serve and cheaper or free, but pages live inside the account system, index less reliably, and carry no editorial context. The working pattern is channel placement for the announcement's anchor URL and account posts for follow-on content cadence — not either/or.

What tech editors reject is consistent enough to list. Releases without a single number or market data point. Adjective stacks that the advertising law's banned-superlatives rule makes legally awkward anyway ("leading," "best" — strip them before an editor does). Machine-translated phrasing, which reads as foreign within one sentence. And beat mismatches, the most common self-inflicted wound: an enterprise-software story sent to a consumer-gadget outlet helps nobody. Our experience across several hundred tech placements says the minimum viable story is one product fact, one market number, one human quote — everything else is trimmable.

A realistic tech-visibility budget

For a product launch, $200–$600 buys a credible mix: one national outlet (36Kr or TMTPost for fundable stories, IT Home for consumer), three to five verticals matching the product's industry, and one or two digital-channel placements for indexing volume — all rewritten locally, all with named URLs. Add the investor platforms (eastmoney, Xueqiu) if the announcement is a funding round; that combination and its cost logic are covered in our Chinese financial media list. Pricing on our side is published per outlet with indexing terms, visible on the China media pricing page — use it as the baseline when you compare providers, along with our earlier overview of how Chinese tech media is structured.

How to run the list without wasting the budget

Sequence matters more than size. Place the anchor story first — one national outlet, rewritten properly — then syndicate variants (not identical copy; engines deduplicate aggressively) to the verticals over the following week. Check indexing at day seven with a site: query per URL and invoke the remedy clause on any stragglers. Save the account-platform cadence for the weeks after, when the launch's news value has faded but your content calendar has not. Next step, concretely: pick five outlets from the table that match your product's actual beat, get named-URL examples for each from whoever places them, and only then argue about price.