Yahoo News and New York Times occupied the top two slots among news sites in India, according to a comScore study, which looked at the most popular news sites in the country and the growth they had achieved during the past year.

The ascent of Yahoo News is not that surprising because the Yahoo brand is relatively well known in India but, to me, New York Times coming second was a bit surprising. Yahoo has also been advertising its brand in India but I’m not sure if New York Times has been doing anything of the sort at all. And I find Times’ case an interesting one because of its print legacy - a miniscule few in India would have ever seen a copy of the print edition of the newspaper or even heard of it. So Times’ growing fame in India does not hearken to its past, it all boils down to what it’s been doing online.

Even more interesting is the comScore estimate that there was a 67 per cent increase in the number of unique visitors to the Times site between October 2008 and 2009 - the largest for any foreign site (Yahoo’s increase was 26 per cent).

Though the total number of unique visitors recorded in October 2009 was 3,854,000, and maybe constitutes less than a tenth of the total(global) traffic to the site, the numbers are significant because, “as the world’s seventh largest Internet market and one of the fastest growing, India represents fertile ground for both local and multinational publishers hoping to expand their audience footprint.” (-Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for the Asia-Pacific region).

In the case of the Times, what is that that has contributed to the growth in traffic? Yes, times does more India-centric stories these days, apart from its ‘regular’ coverage of the sub-continent, but are more Indians flocking to the site because it does a better job of covering the rest of the world, compared to its competitors like the BBC (despite the focus of its global coverage being primarily America-centric?)

The BBC has a sharper focus when it comes to covering the sub-continent, I feel, but it comes a distant ninth in the comScore table, having witnessed a 28 per cent yearly growth in terms of unique visitors, who numbered 992,000 in October 2009. I think these figures should get the BBC’s news managers re-think their strategy even if they are not the final word in site metrics.

The rest of the table is made of sites of Indian media organisations - largely no surprises there.

Overall, the study found that traffic to online news sites "reached a record 15.8 million visitors age 15 and older in October, up 37 percent from the previous year, and representing 44 percent of the online population in India."

I think some international online news sites have been trying to come up with distinct strategy to exploit the potentially huge audience in India - the results are here to see.