Yahoo! News tops in Malaysia

The report found that more than half of Malaysians online visited a News/Information site in July 2010, reaching more than 5.5 million visitors. Yahoo! News led the category with the most unique visitors, with TheStar.com.my securing the position of most-visited local news brand.

"News sites combine both significant reach and user engagement, making them an ideal destination for many brand advertisers," said Joe Nguyen, comScore vice president for Southeast Asia. "Similar to offline news-reading habits, online readers displayed strong brand loyalty to their preferred news sources. Of the top five local news destinations, only 1 out of 4 Malaysians visited more than one of these sites during the month."

Half of Malaysians online visit news/information sites

In July 2010, 5.5 million Malaysians age 15 years and older visited News/Information sites from a home or work location, representing more than half of the total Internet audience in Malaysia. Yahoo! News led as the most-visited site in the category, reaching 1.2 million visitors, followed by New York Times Digital (which includes the About.com information portal) with 873 000 visitors.

The remainder of the list was largely dominated by local news and information attracting strong user engagement. TheStar.com.my was the top local brand in the ranking reaching 788 000 visitors, with an average visitor spending 16 minutes on the site during July and consuming 18 pages of content on average. Malaysiakini.com reached 547 000 visitors, with users consuming 33 pages on average and spending 16 minutes on the site during the month, while the New Straits Times' Hmetro.com.my saw 545 000 unique visitors, with visitors averaging 20 pages and spending more than 20 minutes on the site.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

News consumers skew strongly towards older male demographic segments

The demographic composition of visitors to the News/Information category revealed strong skews toward older male segments. All male age groups, with the exception of the 15-24 year old age segment, reported above average consumption, with males ages 45-54 consuming 114% more pages of content than an average Malaysian Internet user and males age 55 and older consuming 183% more content than average. Although females consumed significantly less content than males (only 37% of total pages were consumed by females), females age 55 and older consumed more than twice as many pages of content as the average Internet user.

*Composition Index Page Views = % of Classifieds Page Views / % of Total Internet Page Views x 100; Index of 100 indicates average representation.