The Irish Times on the Web is the 30th busiest news site in the world and the 14th busiest online newspaper, according to the latest ranking from 100Hot.com, a listing of the world's 100 most popular news sites.
The list is dominated by the web sites of television news channels, such as CNN Interactive, MSNBC and CNBC.
The busiest online newspaper is USA Today, followed by The New York Times and the Washington Post.
Among newspapers with an online service which are not based in the US, The Daily Telegraph (London) is the busiest, followed by the Melbourne Age and the Jerusalem Post and The Irish Times in eighth position.
The Irish Times on the Web was launched in 1994, when it was one of 30 online newspapers worldwide. Now there are close to 4,000, of which just over half are based in the US.
This latest ranking puts The Irish Times on the Web ahead of such celebrated newspaper sites as the South China Morning Post, the Chicago Tribune and the International Herald Tribune, as well as the BBC's home page and the Sky News site.
No other online newspaper from the Republic of Ireland makes it into the list of 100 most popular news sites.
The Belfast Telegraph and the Irish News are at 80 and 91 respectively.
100Hot.com (www.100hot.com/newspaper/) is compiled by Web21, a Silicon Valley-based company, based on the browsing patterns of more than 100,000 web users worldwide, of which about 60 per cent are in the US.
Figures released last month by ABC//electronic showed an increase of more than 40 per cent in traffic to The Irish Times on the Web during the six months to the end of March 1998, reaffirming it as the busiest Irish site.
Some 620,623 people visited the site between March 3rd and April 2nd, 1998, with almost six million "page impressions" (individual Web page accesses) and 1.57 million visits to the site.
The Irish Times on the Web is the current holder of the Golden Spider Irish Internet Award for Top Commercial Website in Ireland.