HITWISE UK VIDEO SHARING UPDATE

YouTube Dominates Video Sharing Market with 60% Share

London, 21st September 2006

This week saw two high profile announcements in the popular video-sharing space. YouTube and Warner Music announced a deal on Monday to air music videos and to allow some music to be included in uploaded videos in return for a share of ad revenue. MSN announced that it will compete with YouTube through its own video sharing service, Soapbox on MSN Video. The latest research from Hitwise, the leading provider in online competitive intelligence, reveals that video sharing continues to enjoy strong growth online in the UK with YouTube dominating the market.

According to Hitwise, market share of UK internet visits to the top 10 video sharing websites has increased 13-fold since the start of the year and has doubled in the past three months. YouTube is the dominant video sharing site, capturing 1 in every 400 UK internet visits and 60% of visits to the top 10 video sharing sites in the week to 16^th September 2006.

Visitors spent an average of 17 minutes and 32 seconds on YouTube last week and the site captured more than twice as large a share of UK visits than Google Video, the second ranked video sharing site, with 23% market share (combined UK and .com domains).

“Advertising supported content has become a popular business model online and music companies are the latest to experiment with it”, said Heather Hopkins, VP of Research for Hitwise UK. “YouTube visits are 8 minutes longer than average for all categories of websites. Coupled with the site’s popularity, YouTube is a potentially lucrative platform for advertising.”

MSN UK Video accounted for 1.71% of UK internet visits among the top 10 video sharing sites last week. The site received 63% of its traffic from MSN UK’s portal page (www.msn.co.uk) and 11 of the top 20 sites sending visits to MSN UK Video last week were MSN properties, accounting for 83% of the site’s upstream visits. Perhaps due to the site’s past focus on slick, professional content, MSN Video has in the past appealed more to an older demographic, with 63% more UK visits from the 55+ age group than YouTube.

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 global clients 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 captures the anonymous online usage, search, and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into our easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement, and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise is a privately held company headquartered in New York City and 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 and statistics, 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