The Star Online is top read Malaysian English language news portal in June

PETALING JAYA: The Star Online is the most popular English language news portal in Malaysia for the month of June, according to a report from Malaysian Digital Association (MDA) and comScore Inc.

In its June press report released on Thursday, MDA and comScore reported that The Star’s website (www.thestar.com.my), had received 817,000 unique visitors in June, placing it first among English language news portals and at seventh place out of a total of 30 local websites.

Other English language news portals on the MDA and comScore top-30 chart included malaysiakini.com at 8th place, themalaysianinsider.com.my at 16th place with 555,000 unique visitors and other portals, such as Malay Mail Online and websites of The New Straits Times and The Sun failing to chart on the top 30.

"Themalaysianinsider.com.my experienced the biggest drop in ranking, moving down seven places to come in at 16th place," said MDA.

In the April report, themalaysianinsider.com.my came in at seventh place.

The website with the most unique visitors in April was www.maybank2u.com.my, with a total of 2,124,000 unique visitors.

Others in the top five include e-commerce site mudah.my at second place, an airline website airasia.com at third place and banking website cimbclicks.com.my at fourth place.

Mudah.my had 1,913,000 unique visitors, while airasia.com had 1,150,000 unique visitors and cimbclicks.com.my had 1,084,000.

MDA said the report highlights how Malaysian internet users consume online content, and international traffic is not counted in the report, which is based on comScore’s Media Matrix.

These results match an Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) report published in May which showed that The Star Online saw a circulation of 49,551, up 17% year-on-year, and that The Star’s circulation rose for both the print and digital formats.

The MDA report, which was released on August 18 showed that The Star maintains its position as the country’s number one English language daily

Its average daily circulation increased to 339,162 in the second half of 2013 up 2.4% or 8,042 copies from a year earlier.