Digital media
Increased Internet accessibility has brought another dimension to Bangladesh’s media landscape and that is an increasing digitalisation. Most leading newspapers have web portals, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and presence on Youtube. Some newspapers outside of the capital have their online news portals.
Most television stations have their separate digital news services. For example, the digital versions of Channel i and NTV are constantly coming up with news, views and interviews. They are in a good competition with the newspapers' online services.
Prothom Alo is the most circulated and influential Bengali daily that provides news from two separate dimensions—print and online portals in Bengali and English. The online portal of Prothom Alo is the number one Bangladeshi website in the world. This portal is accessed by an average 1.2 million visitors from different countries and territories across the globe with over 7 million pageviews every month. The newspaper has more than 13 million Facebook followers, nearly double of what was three years ago. A large number of people, around 1.3 million, are following it in Twitter. The English version of Prothom Alo has 382,000 followers on Facebook. The amount of revenue the newspaper earns from digital version has crossed US$10m and the amount is going up, according to the newspaper.
The Daily Star went online in 2006 and was developing slowly. However, it got a good lift in the last five years as the digital section has been growing significantly by engaging more staff and generating diversified content, including interactive and multimedia to attract both local and international readers. According to the newspaper, its website had over one million active users till January 2018 with over 70,000 daily active users. Most of the readers remain connected through their mobile. The daily has around 2.7 million followers on Facebook, 460,000 Twitter followers and 50,000 subscribers on Youtube. The addition of local-language stories has attracted readers too. Prominent and interesting stories are being translated in Bengali and are being read by a good number of people. This helped the daily to generate more revenue, with around 53 percent growth in 2017 than the previous year. In addition, there are numerous news portals on the web. According to the Ministry of Information, some 2,018 such portals have so far applied for registration.