A comprehensive study of the Jewish community’s Internet presence has revealed that overall traffic to major Jewish news sites and educational sites is on the rise.

Within that framework, Chabad.org, the flagship Web site of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, “consistently serves as an example of what a successful educational/informational Web presence can look like,” states the report, which was just released by the media company 4Wall LLC. “There are a number of strong sites, with Chabad emerging as a brand leader.”

Through comparing site traffic data from the past fiscal quarter to data from the same quarter last year, the authors of the Jewish Internet Metric Study assert that major Jewish educational Web sites experienced “decent traffic” over the past year. Chabad.org, however, posted the largest gain at 37 percent.

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JInsider, a clearinghouse of Jewish content from several different Web-based sources, teamed up with 4Wall LLC to release the report, which the authors modeled after benchmark management studies published by McKinsey & Company.

According to the study, in the past quarter, Chabad.org recorded an average of 936,755 unique visitors per month. The site with the next-highest number was Jewishvirtuallibrary.org, with 578,028 unique visitors per month.

In keeping with directives of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, to use all available technology to ensure that Jews of all ages and backgrounds could have access to the Torah’s teachings, the late Rabbi Yosef Y. Kazen founded Chabad.org more than a decade ago. At its founding, the site led the nascent push to establish a Jewish presence on the Internet.

Today, assisted by the efforts of a four-member Lubavitch World Headquarters steering committee, the site offers tens of thousands of pages of classic Torah commentaries, more than 10,000 audio classes, original footage of the Rebbe’s public talks, children’s videos, news stories and an ever-expanding array of sections relevant to life’s challenges and hurdles, from dealing with economic difficulties to rearing children. In addition, thousands of people utilize Chabad.org’s “Ask the Rabbi” service each year.

Turning to the emergence of social media as a tool to market Jewish content and attract visitors, the study noted several sites’ successful use of Twitter and YouTube to promote their offerings, but concluded that Chabad.org’s model of networked member sites resulted in a “more-focused brand across social media.”

“Chabad has leveraged its international identity in coordination with its local chapters to create a social Web experience that is [both] on a local level and part of something ‘larger,’ ” states the report. “As a result, while our metrics count only the largest Chabad account on any one social platform, there are often dozens more localized versions with loyal local followers all linked through the Chabad brand.”

In its discussion of major Jewish news sites, the study concluded that the Israeli-based Jpost.com and Haaretz.com lead the pack in terms of commercial viability. The market of American-based sites, on the other hand, has become more fragmented, leading the study’s authors to recommend the creation of an aggregate site that would draw on content from each U.S. outlet.