About Yeeyi

Yeeyi

Yeeyi, at yeeyi.com and known in Chinese as 亿忆网, is an Australian Chinese-language online news and community portal serving the Chinese community in Australia. Academic research records that its website has been in operation since 2006 and describes it as claimed to be the most popular Chinese website in Australia. A Lowy Institute study of Chinese-language media in Australia names Yeeyi.com among the Chinese-language news websites that prospered as digital technology transformed the sector, alongside 1688.com and SydneyToday.com, with online audiences expanding beyond Australia to mainland Chinese consumers interested in Australian education, immigration, investment and property. Yeeyi's own app presents it as a news and life-services platform for the Australian Chinese community, delivering local news, regulations, immigration policy and community information, with user-generated local content across Australian cities. It is a distinct, Australia-based diaspora portal with its own editorial and community operation.

Origins and Standing Among Australian Chinese Websites

Yeeyi's website dates to 2006, according to a University of Technology Sydney study of WeChat subscription accounts in Australia, which notes that the site has been in operation since that year and is claimed to be the most popular Chinese website in Australia, catering to almost all aspects of Chinese-Australian community life. That longevity matters in a young sector: many of the Australia-focused Chinese digital outlets studied by researchers were much newer — among the top ten WeChat subscription accounts in the same study, only Yeeyi had less than three years of operation as a WeChat account, precisely because its centre of gravity was its older, established website. Yeeyi therefore belongs to the first generation of Australian Chinese web portals, founded when Chinese-language news websites first took off in Australia, rather than to the later wave of social-media-only outlets.

The Digital Disruption of Australian Chinese Media

The Lowy Institute's September 2021 analysis, Translating Tension: Chinese-Language Media in Australia, by Fan Yang, supplies the documented context in which Yeeyi grew. The rise of digital technologies disrupted the Chinese-language media industry in Australia as it did the broader media sector: digital technologies significantly lowered the cost of operating media enterprises, and Chinese-language news websites took off. Among those that prospered were Yeeyi.com, 1688.com and Sydneytoday.com. Online audiences quickly expanded beyond Australia to reach consumers in mainland China with an interest in Australian education, immigration, investment or property — a dual audience, diaspora and prospective migrant, that shapes what portals like Yeeyi publish. The Lowy Institute's Being Chinese in Australia survey found that three-quarters of Chinese-Australians consume Chinese-language online news and more than half read printed Chinese-language newspapers, in a community of about 1.2 million Australians of Chinese heritage. Yeeyi is one of the commercial portals built to serve that documented demand.

News Content and How It Is Produced

The Lowy study examined the production of Chinese-language media content in Australia through a content analysis of 501 articles commenting on the Australia–China bilateral relationship across three outlets, and through interviews with senior media professionals. Its broader findings describe the sector Yeeyi operates in: Chinese-language media outlets in Australia produce relatively little original content, and instead translate and reproduce the majority of their content from Australian, rather than Chinese, mainstream sources; translations of stories published by mainstream Australian media outlets made up 97.8 per cent of the content in one part of the study's reporting. The report also found that self-censorship, where it occurred, was exercised by staff in mainland China translating Australian news and did not necessarily mean the outlets were politically aligned with Beijing. Reuters' coverage of the report added that Canberra had increased scrutiny of Chinese media in Australia amid foreign-interference concerns. Against that backdrop, Yeeyi's identity is that of an Australian commercial portal: it curates and translates Australian news for Chinese readers, and its commercial incentives are Australian — local advertising, local services and local audience.

The App: News and Life Services in One Platform

Yeeyi's mobile app, described in its store listings as a news information and life-services platform for Australian Chinese, shows the portal's full range. The app integrates local real-time information covering daily necessities, food, housing and transportation. It provides news feeds delivering local news, regulations, immigration policies and community activities to the Chinese community in Australia. It carries a comprehensive job recruitment section with listings tailored to the Chinese community. Its housing information covers house leasing and property transactions. It supports second-hand transactions in which users buy and sell items including teaching materials and pets. For professional needs it offers services including accounting, taxation, translation and legal assistance. The app's listing presents the platform as highly active, with user-generated content contributed daily at scale — a claim made in the listing itself, which this profile reports as the platform's own description rather than as an audited figure. The pattern is clear: Yeeyi is not only a news site but a classifieds-and-services marketplace wrapped around its news.

A Community Portal Model

The life-services half of Yeeyi is what distinguishes it from a conventional news outlet, and it matches the documented behaviour of Chinese-language digital media in Australia, where portals grew by serving the practical needs of new migrants: understanding regulations, finding housing and work, and navigating education and immigration systems. Yeeyi's own description stresses user-generated local content across Australian cities, which means the portal's coverage is produced partly by its community — listings, posts and local information contributed city by city — rather than solely by a central newsroom. That model lowers the cost of covering a diaspora scattered across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and other cities, and it makes the portal sticky: a reader who comes for a rental listing or a visa-rule explainer returns for news, and the reverse. The UTS study's phrase for the site — catering to almost all aspects of community life — captures exactly this portal logic.

Yeeyi on WeChat and the Platform Shift

Like most Australian Chinese media, Yeeyi also operates within the WeChat ecosystem. The UTS political-economy study of Australia-focused WeChat subscription accounts ranked Yeeyi ninth among the top accounts it analysed, noting its short history as a WeChat account compared with its long-established website. The same study describes the Australia-based WeChat accounts generally as business entities whose first objective is profit, operating in a politically sensitive space, receiving no funding from either the Chinese or the Australian government, and mostly prioritising audience appeal over original journalism, with some beginning to aspire to produce original and independent content. The Lowy Institute separately found that 86 per cent of Chinese-Australians use WeChat often or sometimes for Chinese-language news. Yeeyi's presence across its own website, its app and WeChat reflects the sector's reality: the audience is distributed across platforms, and a portal founded in 2006 must follow it.

Audience: Diaspora Readers and Readers in China

Yeeyi's audience is documented as twofold. In Australia, it serves one of the largest Chinese-speaking communities outside China: the 2021 Census counted just under 550,000 Australian residents born in China, 2.2 per cent of the population, within a wider community of about 1.2 million Australians of Chinese heritage counted in Lowy's reporting. Beyond Australia, the Lowy Institute records that the audiences of Australia's prospering Chinese news websites expanded to mainland Chinese consumers interested in Australian education, immigration, investment and property — readers who may never have lived in Australia but consume Australian Chinese media as research for migration, study or purchase decisions. Yeeyi's mix of immigration policy news, housing transactions, jobs and education-adjacent classifieds is precisely calibrated to both audiences, and helps explain why a community portal, rather than a newspaper website, became one of the sector's prospering brands.

Distinctions from Other Australian Chinese Media

Yeeyi is editorially and commercially distinct from Australia's public-service Chinese media. SBS Chinese and ABC News Chinese are the Chinese services of Australia's public broadcasters, funded publicly and produced to broadcaster standards; Yeeyi is a commercial, community-generated portal. It is also distinct from Sydney Today, the other prospering portal named beside it in the Lowy study, which is a separate business already listed separately in this directory. And it differs from the printed Chinese-language newspapers studied by Lowy — daily papers with circulations of around 20,000 — in being digital-first since 2006. Its position in the scholarly record is consistent across two independent studies: the Lowy Institute names it among the websites that prospered in the digital disruption, and the UTS study identifies it as a top-ten WeChat presence built on the country's most popular Chinese website. That is the documented standing on which this profile rests.

Yeeyi Today

Today Yeeyi continues at yeeyi.com and through its mobile app as a Chinese-language news and life-services platform for the Australian Chinese community: local Australian news, regulations and immigration policy, community information, jobs, housing, second-hand trading and professional services, contributed to and read across Australian cities. Nearly two decades after its website began in 2006, it remains one of the reference points researchers reach for when describing Chinese-language media in Australia — cited by the Lowy Institute in 2021 as a prospering portal and ranked in academic work on the WeChat era. For this directory, Yeeyi is the Australian community-portal entry among Chinese online news outlets: not a broadcaster, not a newspaper, but the kind of diaspora platform that digital technology made possible and that hundreds of thousands of Chinese-Australians made necessary.