Market Turmoil Drives Consumers Online, although searches for “Big Brother” more popular than “Share Prices”.

London 14^th August 2007  Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today reveals that UK consumers rushed online on Friday for information on the financial market turmoil. Friday 10^th August was the busiest day since Budget Day on 21^st March for UK Internet visits to Business Information and Stocks and Shares websites, with visits to Business Information websites up 11% on Friday compared with Thursday 9^th, and visits to Stocks and Shares websites up 13%.

Yahoo! and MSN saw more of their portal traffic divert to their finance sections on Friday as UK consumers clicked through for market updates. UK Internet visits to Yahoo! UK & Ireland Finance were up 19% on Friday and MSN Money UK’s Internet visits were up 9% from the day before. Other fast movers were FT.com with UK Internet visits up 24% and Fool.co.uk up 11%. UK consumers were also searching for information, with the number of search terms that included the words “share price” up 14% last week, “ftse” up 21% and “ftse 100” up 217%.

Interest in Markets overshadowed by Fantasy Football Frenzy and Big Brother

News and Media websites also enjoyed a strong week last week with UK Internet visits up 14% year on year. However, Hitwise analysis reveals that News and Media internet traffic surged on the back of fantasy football, big brother and other news events rather than the market turmoil. The highest volume non-branded search terms sending visits to News and Media websites last week were “weather forecast”, “big brother”, “uk weather” and searches for Formula 1 driver “lewis hamilton”. Among the highest volume queries, those that saw an increase last week were “lewis Hamilton” up 83% and “madeleine mccann” up 127%.

However, whilst bankers were cutting short holidays in response to the market turmoil, Hitwise data reveals that consumers’ thoughts were focused elsewhere. Last week, the volume of UK internet searches for “big brother” was 49 times higher than the volume of searches for “ftse” and searches for “fantasy football” were 10 times higher. In fact, hype around the Premier League and offline promotion of fantasy football caused UK Internet searches for “fantasy football” to soar to their highest level in two years.

For copies of charts to accompany this release, please contact jannie.cahill@hitwise.com.

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com, operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.

For media enquiries, please contact:

Jannie Cahill
jannie.cahill@hitwise.com

Tel: 020 7378 3619