Hitwise Releases Asia Pacific Social Networking Report 2008

Social Networks see 62% growth in Australia, 88.6% in NZ over 12 months

Melbourne - 29 February 2008 - Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today released its Asia Pacific Social Networking Report 2008. This report covers:

• Leading social networks in Asia Pacific markets
• Trends in information and communication channels
• Audience profile of networks
• The social graph and implications for marketers

Highlights from the report include:

• The 40 leading social networking websites experienced strong growth in the past 12 months in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong; Australia and New Zealand experienced the highest growth, increasing 62% and 88.6% respectively comparing market share of visits to the Social Networks custom category in February 2007 and January 2008.

• MySpace was the leading Social Network in Australia accounting for 44.16% of visits to the Social Networks custom category in January 2008. Geographical differences were highlighted in the report by the fact that Bebo dominated in New Zealand with 41.77% share, Friendster in Singapore with 41.99% and Facebook in Hong Kong with 37.72% share.

• Interaction with Email Services and Search Engines is changing as users increasingly choose to communicate with friends and source relevant information through Social Networks.

• Based on Hitwise Mosaic household demographics data, major Social Networks attract key differences in online audiences. For example, Facebook users in Australia are generally well-educated and affluent, while Bebo attracts multi-cultural and family groups.

• The social graph, illustrating how users represent themselves online, will be an important point of debate in 2008. Major social networks send a large proportion of traffic to each other as well as to many other second-tier social networks. For example, of the traffic that MySpace, Facebook and Bebo send to other Social Networks, more than 89% of their downstream traffic is sent to second-tier players. This wide dispersal of traffic illustrates the concept of the social graph, where users maintain profiles on many different websites.

Register for your copy of the Hitwise Asia Pacific Social Networking Report today.

For more information visit http://hitwise.com.au/.

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 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 http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter