Malaysiakini, the country’s leading independent news portal, has maintained its number one ranking as the nation’s most visited news website accessed through home and work computers for the second consecutive month this year.

According to comScore's MMX™ report for February 2015, Malaysiakini.com retained its top spot in the ‘news and information’ website category with a total of 1.17 million monthly unique visitors, down from January’s 1.25 million.

The Star Online holds on to its number two spot, with 1.07 million unique visitors, while The Malaysian Insider is at number three with 957,000 unique visitors.

Other top sites include Malay-language news portals Harian Metro, Sinar Harian, Berita Harian in that order.

According to Malaysiakini chief executive officer Premesh Chandran, the consumption of online news continues to grow in Malaysia and elsewhere.

“With the huge growth in mobile, it’s becoming clear that online portals now dominate the news agenda,” he said.   

Meanwhile, Malaysiakini’s KiniTV has doubled its audience over the past 12 months, reaching 393,000 unique visitors.

In a custom comparison among selected video news portals in the same category, KiniTV is a shade behind market leader Astro Awani which pulled in 396,000 visitors.

Tiny workforce, big reach

KiniTV chief executive officer Yong Kai Ping attributed this remarkable achievement to the sheer dedication of its tiny 13-member workforce.

Together, the team has delivered not only short video clips on key events, but also live streaming and instant video upload from the ground, thus allowing the audience to have a real “taste” of breaking news.

KiniTV’s February figure is its second highest viewership. It hit a record viewership of 8.6 million video views in March, surpassing the previous record of 7.21 million views registered at the May 5 general election in 2013.

KiniTV has kicked off a daily news bulletin a few weeks ago and it will host a series of talk shows in the coming months.    

comScore, which releases their report monthly, will announce the March results at the end of next month. The American-based company is a global leader in digital media analytics.