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U.S. Visits to Question and Answer Websites Increased 118 Percent Year-over-Year
Yahoo! Answers receives 74 percent of all U.S. visits

NEW YORK, NY - March 19, 2008 - The market share of U.S. visits to a custom category of Question and Answer websites has increased 118 percent for the week ending Mar. 15, 2008, compared to the same week in 2007, Hitwise reported today. Over the past two years, U.S. visits to this category have increased 889 percent comparing Feb. 2008 versus Feb. 2006.

The most visited website within the Questions and Answers category last week was Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com), which received 74.05 percent of the market share of U.S. visits. Wiki.Answers.com was the second most visited website receiving 18.35 percent of visits, followed by Answerbag.com, which received 4.42 percent of visits. WikiAnswers, launched in June 2007 has seen U.S. visits increase 125 percent comparing the week ending Jun. 9, 2007versus Mar. 15, 2008.

'Online users are increasingly seeking advice from question and answer websites that leverage shared knowledge contributed across a community of experts and enthusiasts,' said Heather Dougherty, research director, Hitwise. 'The popularity of user generated media has helped to establish a category for social knowledge where consumers can obtain answers from a single aggregated source developed through others asking similar questions.'

Average Time Spent and Demographics

Females accounted for 52 percent of all the U.S. visits to the top five Question and Answer websites for the week ending Mar. 15, 2008. The majority of these visits came from users between the ages of 35-44, 24 percent, followed by users 25-34 with 21 percent.

The average visit time among the top five Question and Answer websites increased 44 percent comparing the week ending Mar. 15, 2008 versus the week ending Mar. 17, 2007. Yahoo! Answers led among the top five Question and Answer websites with users spending an average of 9 minutes and 9 seconds on the website.

New and Returning Visitors

For the week ending Mar. 15, 2008, Yahoo! Answers received 52 percent of its share of traffic from new visitors. Among the top five Question and Answer websites by market share, WikiAnswers.com and Answerbag followed with 76 and 87 percent, respectively, of new traffic that has not visited during the previous month. Askville received the highest amount of new traffic with 93 percent.

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.