Advertising in China

China is the second-largest advertising market on earth and the least portable. Almost nothing a global media team carries into a new market travels here: not the platforms, not the pixels, not the identity graphs, not the buying interfaces, not the creative library. The audience is enormous and reachable, but only from inside a small number of vertically integrated ecosystems that own the content, the ad server, the measurement and the checkout at once.

This guide is a neutral overview of how advertising works in mainland China: the platforms that carry real reach, the offline channels that still matter, what shapes cost, the regulatory regime under SAMR and PIPL, and the routes to market for a foreign buyer.

Market overview

China is the world’s second-largest advertising market after the United States, with total media ad spending estimated at roughly US$181.7 billion in 2025 (eMarketer, Worldwide Ad Spending Forecast 2025). What makes it structurally different from every other top-10 market is the digital share: at about 86.1 percent of total ad spend, China is the most digital-weighted major advertising market on earth, well ahead of the roughly 68 to 69 percent global average dentsu forecasts for 2026. Growth has cooled from the double-digit years: dentsu’s December 2025 forecast puts China at +6.1 percent for 2026, still among the fastest of the large markets, while Omdia recorded a 2 percent dip in Chinese digital ad revenue in a recent soft year. The market is now cyclical rather than automatically expansionary.

The audience is vast and saturated. CNNIC counted 1.123 billion internet users at June 2025, of whom 99.4 percent go online via mobile, and QuestMobile measures average daily mobile use at 7.97 hours across 117.9 sessions, so attention is fragmented into micro-sessions inside a handful of super-apps. Short video reaches 1.068 billion people, 95.1 percent of netizens, and instant messaging 1.093 billion. Rural penetration has reached 69.2 percent, and the user base is ageing: 33.5 percent of netizens are 50 or older.

The defining feature for a media buyer is that China is a closed, licensed ecosystem. In place of the global platforms sit three or four vertically integrated walled gardens: Tencent (Weixin and WeChat), ByteDance (Douyin and Toutiao via Ocean Engine), Alibaba (Taobao and Tmall via Alimama) and Baidu. Each owns the audience, the ad server, the measurement, the content and, increasingly, the checkout. Retail media is therefore not emerging here but the mature core of the market, at roughly 38 percent of digital ad spend on eMarketer’s numbers, and closed-loop buying, meaning an ad click straight into a Mini Program, Mini Shop or Douyin store with the conversion attributed inside the same platform, is the standard performance model. Tencent credits it for Marketing Services revenue of RMB145.0 billion in FY2025, up 19 percent.

Digital landscape and dominant platforms

There is no general-purpose media market in Chinese digital. There are gardens, and you plan inside each of them.

Weixin and WeChat (Tencent Ads) is the default super-app, with 1,418 million combined monthly active users at 31 December 2025 (Tencent FY2025 results). Inventory spans Moments feed ads, Official Account article ads, Mini Program and Mini Shop placements, Weixin Search, and Video Accounts (Channels), whose user time grew over 20 percent year on year in 2025. Tencent’s ad load stays deliberately below peers’, so reach is enormous but impression supply is rationed and priced accordingly. Cost context sits on the WeChat advertising benchmarks for China.

Douyin, bought through ByteDance’s Ocean Engine, is the dominant short-video and short-video-commerce platform, reported at 900 million to over 1 billion monthly active users depending on the source (QuestMobile and Statista, 2025-26). Qianchuan is the closed-loop e-commerce ad product feeding Douyin’s in-app store and livestream rooms, and search is increasingly embedded in the video and commerce flow, which makes Douyin a discovery engine as well as a feed. It is a separate product from the international TikTok app and is not bought through TikTok’s ads manager, though the TikTok benchmarks for China are a useful structural reference.

Alibaba and Alimama (Taobao, Tmall) is the original retail media network and still the biggest: search ads, display and brand buys priced against first-party purchase data. With retail media at around 38 percent of Chinese digital ad spend (eMarketer), marketplace media is the largest single line in most consumer brand plans, not an add-on. Our guide to the best media buying agencies for ecommerce compares how the discipline is resourced elsewhere.

Baidu is still the leading mainland search engine. StatCounter put it at 51.15 percent of Chinese search referrals over July 2025 to July 2026, though trackers disagree materially on the exact share, and CNNIC counted 777 million search users at June 2025. Baidu also owns Baike, Tieba and the Baidu Tongji analytics product. Its share is under pressure from in-app search inside Douyin and Weixin and from AI assistants such as ByteDance’s Doubao and Tencent’s Yuanbao. The Google Ads benchmarks for China show why Baidu’s auction cannot be planned from a global search template.

Xiaohongshu (RED) is the lifestyle discovery and review platform, widely reported in the 300 to 400 million monthly active user range in 2025-26, with a young, female-skewing, high-intent urban audience. Buying splits between feed ads and KOL or KOC seeding through the official Pugongying creator marketplace, and unbranded, review-style content is the native format that outperforms conventional creative. It is critical for beauty, fashion, travel and premium goods.

The supporting tier rounds out most plans. Kuaishou is the other national short-video platform, stronger in lower-tier cities and northern China, usually the efficiency complement to Douyin. JD.com and Pinduoduo are the second and third retail media pools, JD skewing electronics and appliances with logistics-linked data, Pinduoduo running on price-led discovery. Bilibili is a long-form video community with a Gen Z and animation-comics-gaming base, strongest for gaming, tech, anime and autos. Meituan and Dianping form the local-services layer. Weibo remains the venue for celebrity news, brand ambassador announcements and hot-search topic buys, weak for direct response but hard to skip at launch; the X (Twitter) benchmarks for China are structural context only, since X is inaccessible in the mainland.

Long-form OTT, meaning iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku and Mango TV, is where premium video budgets land now that broadcast television is contracting. It sells pre-roll, mid-roll, sponsorship and product placement in drama and variety, plus a growing smart-TV pool, and sponsorship of a hit variety show remains a genuinely mass-reach buy. It is bought separately from the Western connected-TV market, though the planning discipline overlaps with our guide to CTV advertising agencies; the YouTube benchmarks for China are structural context only, since YouTube is inaccessible in the mainland.

The blocked platforms matter as a planning warning. Google, YouTube, Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, X, LinkedIn and most Western ad tech are inaccessible in the mainland, so global pixels, tag managers, DSPs and identity graphs do not function. Our Meta and LinkedIn China benchmark pages are reference points for reaching Chinese-language audiences outside the mainland, not a route into it.

Offline channels

Offline is smaller in share than in almost any comparable market, but it is not marginal, and one channel in particular is a genuine Chinese specialism.

Television, meaning CCTV and the provincial satellite tier, remains nationally significant but is structurally declining. Across 49 CCTV and provincial channels, brand counts fell 1.8 percent year on year and total ad duration dropped 6.35 percent in recent trend data (Octoplus Media, 2026). CCTV carries state-scale reach and prestige; the provincial satellite tier, including Hunan and Mango, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Dragon TV, is where entertainment sponsorship money sits. Measurement is CSM Media Research. Dentsu forecasts global television growth of 2.4 percent in 2026, and in China the direction is flatter still. See the TV advertising costs for China.

Out-of-home, especially elevator and lift-lobby media, is China’s most distinctive offline channel. Focus Media runs a national network of elevator LCD screens and lift-lobby posters across millions of residential and office buildings, giving daily, forced-attention frequency against urban white-collar households, and its planned acquisition of rival Xinchao Media consolidates the category further. OOH has been the most resilient traditional medium here, and dentsu forecasts +4.1 percent globally for 2026. Subway networks in the Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities add high-dwell urban reach through station domination, car wraps and platform-edge screens, while rail and airport media serve business and premium-travel audiences, frequently as the launch amplifier alongside a Xiaohongshu or Douyin content push. See the out-of-home costs for China.

Radio and in-car audio is reduced but not dead: drive-time radio retains reach in car-heavy metros, and listening has largely migrated to apps such as Ximalaya, QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music and to in-vehicle infotainment. See the radio advertising costs for China. Print is effectively residual: circulation has collapsed, dentsu forecasts print declining 3.0 percent globally in 2026, and the use case is narrow, meaning luxury titles, trade press and state media placements bought for signalling. See the print advertising costs for China.

Cinema is a seasonal channel around Chinese New Year and the summer blockbuster window. Retail and in-store covers screens, shelf media and shopper activation in supermarket and convenience chains, and anchors the QR-code journeys that are ubiquitous here.

What it costs

There is no single price for advertising in China, and rules of thumb imported from other markets mislead here because the auction dynamics differ in kind, not just in degree.

Four factors shape cost most. First, rationed supply inside the largest garden: Tencent’s low ad load means Weixin impressions are scarce relative to its 1.4 billion user base, so pricing reflects scarcity rather than raw reach. Second, commerce-linked auctions: in retail media and closed-loop performance buying you bid against advertisers with direct revenue attribution and a known return threshold, which raises floor prices in commercially dense categories. Third, the commerce calendar: 618, Double 11, Double 12 and Chinese New Year concentrate intent and auction pressure into narrow windows whose rates bear no relation to the rest of the year. Fourth, qualification and moderation friction: regulated categories carry pre-approval cycles and content-review latency. Entity choice matters too, since onshore buying in RMB and offshore buying billed in foreign currency do not produce like-for-like effective rates.

For grounded, dated figures rather than rules of thumb, use our benchmarks, and read how each number is sourced and verified in our methodology.

Regulation and ad standards

The primary regulator is the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) and its provincial and municipal counterparts, which enforce the Advertising Law of the PRC, in force since 1995 and substantially overhauled in 2015. Alongside it sit the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) for online content, algorithmic recommendation and data; the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) for broadcast; and MIIT for ICP filings and licences.

The online rulebook. The operative instrument is SAMR’s Measures on the Administration of Internet Advertising, Order No. 72, promulgated 25 February 2023 and effective 1 May 2023. Internet ads must be identifiable as ads, and paid search listings must be labelled “advertisement” and clearly distinguished from natural results (Art. 9). Pop-ups must carry a conspicuous close symbol and permit genuine one-click closure, with penalties under Art. 62 of the Advertising Law for obstructing it (Arts. 10 and 26). Tobacco including e-cigarettes, and prescription medicines, may not be advertised online at all (Art. 6). Advertising for medical care, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, pesticides, veterinary medicine, health foods and foods for special medical purposes requires prior content review and must run exactly as approved, with any change re-submitted (Art. 7), and Article 8 blocks embedding those products inside “health and fitness” content or putting purchase links on the same page. Livestream and creator content that markets goods falls within the same publisher and endorser liability chain.

Claims. The Advertising Law prohibits superlative and unverifiable claims, including “national-level”, “highest-grade”, “best”, “No.1” and equivalents, with substantial fines, which catches a large share of directly translated Western creative. SAMR issued enforcement guidelines on the citation of data and claims in December 2025, tightening the evidentiary standard for statistics used in ads. Content must also avoid sovereignty and political sensitivities, including map depictions, the naming of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and national symbols.

Privacy. The Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), effective 1 November 2021, governs alongside the Cybersecurity Law and Data Security Law. It requires separate consent for many advertising-relevant processing activities and, under Article 24, gives individuals the right to refuse automated decision-making and to be offered an option not based on their personal characteristics, the practical equivalent of a personalised-advertising opt-out that the major platforms implement in app settings. Cross-border transfer of Chinese personal data requires one of the CAC-recognised routes, meaning a security assessment, standard contractual clauses, or certification, whether you buy onshore or from a Hong Kong or Singapore entity. The CAC’s Provisions on the Management of Algorithmic Recommendation Services add filing, transparency and user-control duties.

How to buy and routes to market

The first decision is onshore versus offshore, and it shapes everything downstream.

Onshore means operating as a local advertiser: a Chinese legal vehicle, meaning a wholly foreign-owned enterprise (WFOE), a joint venture or a sponsoring local partner; platform seats under that entity; spend in RMB; and local invoicing via fapiao. Hosting a site on mainland servers also requires an MIIT ICP filing (bei’an), or a commercial ICP licence if the site sells, advertises or takes payment. That commercial licence is generally only obtainable by a wholly Chinese-owned company, or a joint venture where foreign ownership stays at or below 50 percent, so the entity-plus-ICP path is a multi-month project. The payoff is the widest inventory and format access, full closed-loop commerce, lower latency for locally hosted assets, and the standing platforms extend to committed local advertisers.

Offshore, or cross-border, means reaching mainland consumers from a Hong Kong or Singapore entity through the platforms’ cross-border ad programmes: no ICP, foreign-currency billing, weeks rather than months to launch. The trade-offs are narrower access to some onshore inventory and formats, constraints on closed-loop commerce, and cross-border latency for anything hosted outside the mainland; PIPL’s transfer rules still apply. It is the sensible route for market testing and brand work, and many brands start offshore and migrate once the business justifies it, often from a regional hub, which makes our guide to the best media buying agencies in Singapore a common companion read.

How the buying works. There is no single omni-channel DSP. You open a seat per walled garden, meaning Tencent Ads for Weixin, Ocean Engine and Qianchuan for Douyin, Alimama for Taobao and Tmall, Baidu for search, plus Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, JD and Bilibili, and plan across them manually. Independent programmatic exchanges exist but are marginal; the money sits inside the gardens, close to the inverse of the open-market model in our guide to programmatic advertising agencies. Most platforms run on prepaid deposits rather than credit terms, and accounts are commonly opened through platform-authorised channel agencies that also handle qualification paperwork. Expect to supply a business licence, trademark registration and category-specific qualification documents before approval, and expect every creative to clear platform moderation before it serves.

China rewards advertisers who treat it as a different system rather than a difficult version of a familiar one: pick the entity route deliberately, build inside the gardens, rebuild measurement locally, write for the Advertising Law, and price the plan against real in-market costs. Start with the benchmarks and methodology. For contrast, see our guides to Japan and South Korea, the two other major Asian markets that run on domestic platforms rather than the global duopoly, and to how the discipline is resourced in London, New York and Miami.