FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Matt Tatham - Hitwise - 1.212.380.2939

Online Retail Traffic Up 6.2 Percent Compared to 2005

Searches For “PlayStation" Up 171 Percent Heading Into Launch

NEW YORK, NY  - November 13, 2006 - Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, announced today that visits to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index^[1], a collection of the top 100 online shopping websites in the U.S., increased 6.2 percent for the week ending November 11, 2006 compared to the same time period in 2005 (week ending November 12, 2005).

“Online retail strengthened in Q3 and in the six weeks since October 1, 2006 visits to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index have been up an average of 5.7 percent, which indicates strong growth for online retailers during the 2006 holiday shopping season," said Bill Tancer, general manager of Research at Hitwise. “Historically, Thanksgiving Day is the peak day for market share of visits to the retail category, and this year, based on our data, is poised to surpass 2005. The strongest pre-Christmas spike should come the second weekend in December."

Searches for "PlayStation 3" Up 171 Percent Heading Into Launch

The latest version of video game systems launch this month with Sony's release of PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's roll out of the Wii console. Online searches for 'playstation 3', increased 171 percent for the week ending November 11, 2006 compared to two weeks ago, the week ending October 28, 2006. Searches for 'nintendo wii' increased 135 percent in the same time period. Microsoft's Xbox 360, launched during the 2005 holiday season, saw an increase in searches to the term 'box 360' by 63 percent for the same time period above. Google (www.google.com) was responsible for 18.16 percent of the visits to the PlayStation website (www.playstation.com) for the week ending November 11, 2006. Other leading sites driving traffic to the Playstation website were Yahoo! Search (search.yahoo.com), which accounted for 5.40 percent of upstream visits and MySpace (www.myspace.com), accounting for 4.57 percent of upstream visits in the same time period.

Weekly HolidayShopping Website Tracker:

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.

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