PETALING JAYA: The Star Online trumped its rivals in October, emerging as the top read news portal in the latest Malaysian Digital Association (MDA) and comScore Inc report.
The Star Online ranked ahead of Harian Metro and Sinar Harian, which came in second and third among news portals.
The report also listed The Star’s website, www.thestar.com.my, in seventh place for the top 30 local websites, receiving 920,000 unique visitors from desktop computers.
This was an improvement of two spots from September when it had registered 759,000 unique visitors.
Maybank’s online banking portal, www.maybank2u.com.my, remained in first place with over 2.8 million unique visitors, followed by Mudah.my and Airasia.com, which were ranked second and third at 1.9 million and 1.4 million visitors.
It has been a record high year for The Star Online, with the news portal amassing more than 60 million views in March alone.
The website has also consistently been the most read news portal throughout the year, coming out tops in June and April as well.
However, the ranking for Malaysiakini, usually a close second to The Star Online in the English language news portal category, plunged after it saw a drop in visitors.
It registered 634,000 unique visitors in October compared to 671,000 previously.
The Malaysian Insider was the second most read English news portal with 720,000 unique visitors and The Rakyat Post was third with 683,000.
For the web properties category, Google sites, Facebook and Yahoo sites were the top while The Star Media Group came in at 22nd place.
Among the web properties accessed by mobile users, The Star Media Group ranked eighth out of 20, registering 882,000 unique visitors.
Astro group was the top web property accessed by mobile users for the month with more than two million visitors.
Released monthly, the MDA and comScore Inc report measures web activity among Malaysian Internet users.