HITWISE UK ENTERTAINMENT UPDATE

Jedi fever strikes online as Star Wars film premieres in the UK

London, 17^th May 2005

Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, today reports Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is the number one film online ahead of its UK release on Thursday.

With more than 5,000 fanatical fans braving the downpours in Leicester Square yesterday for the film’s London premiere, anticipation for the final Star Wars installment is clearly running high - and Hitwise Search Terms Data reveals that Star Wars is now the most searched-for film amongst UK Internet users.

Claiming almost 1% of all searches for sites in the online Movies sector, the term ‘star wars’ is more frequently searched for than the top terms for both Harry Potter and Orlando Bloom’s latest blockbuster, Kingdom of Heaven.

Out of the top 10 search terms for specific movies analysed by Hitwise, four relate to the Star Wars film – including ‘starwars’, ‘revenge of the sith’ and ‘star wars episode 3’. Overall, ‘star wars’ is the third most popular search term resulting in traffic to sites in the Entertainment – Movies category (behind ‘imdb’ and ‘odeon’ at #2 and #3 respectively).

In addition, daily rankings data for May 16^th shows that the official Star Wars website (www.starwars.com) is currently the second most popular site in the Hitwise Entertainment – Movies category with 3.5% market share, ranking just behind the ever-popular Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). This represents a four-fold increase in traffic over the last four weeks.

TOP 10 MOST SEARCHED-FOR MOVIES
Based on data for four weeks ending May 14^th 2005

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.

By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites.  Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.

Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.co.uk

For media enquiries, please contact:

Jannie Cahill
jannie.cahill@hitwise.com

Tel: 020 7378 3619