The huge amount of popularity enjoyed by Cristiano Ronaldo in China has been shown by the number of followers he has picked up on the social networking site Tencent QQ Webio.

Since opening his account a week ago, Ronaldo has picked up 1,134,800 followers on Tencent, which according to Spanish sports paper Diario AS, has 233 million users in China.

Ronaldo's profile features a picture of him posing with the website's mascot, a penguin, as well as a video in which he holds a banner written in English telling his followers they can communicate with him on Tencent whenever they want.

However, despite the Real Madrid player's immediate success, he still has a long way to go before he is able to catch up to Leo Messi in popularity.

The Barcelona forward opened his Tencent account over a year ago and can currently count on 13,671,000 followers - a lot more than Ronaldo, who still has plenty of work to do.