SEARCHES FOR BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN DWARF OTHER NOMINATED MOVIES
Brokeback Mountain Receives Over 9x Searches than all other Nominated Movies Combined
NEW YORK, Jan. 31, 2006— This morning the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations for the 78th annual Academy Awards. While some are predicting that Brokeback Mountain will be a runaway success at the awards show, how popular are the nominated movies and actors in the eyes of U.S. Internet users?
According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, for the week ending January 21, 2006, searches for "Brokeback Mountain" were over 57 times more prevalent than the next most searched on nominated movie, "Crash", and over nine times more prevalent than all other nominated movie titles combined.
"While not predictive of award night winners, search data on the nominated movies provides us with unprecedented insight into what is on the minds of U.S. Internet users", said Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research for Hitwise. "Partly due to its controversial subject matter, Brokeback Mountain has distinguished itself as the clear top-of-mind movie as we approach Academy Awards night".
Based on Hitwise Demographic data, for the four weeks ending January 28, 2006, visitors to the Brokeback Mountain official move site (www.brokebackmountain.com ) were 56.8% male versus 43.2% female while 53.8% of visitors to the site were between the ages of 25 to 44. Regional breakdown of visitors to the site during the same timeframe indicate that the states with the highest index of visitors to the Brokebackmountain.com site based on online representation were: Arkansas (216.8, indicating that online residents of Arkansas were more that twice as likely to visit Brokebackmountain.com than the U.S. Internet population overall), Connecticut (198.2), Oklahoma (167.0), Rhode Island (164.8) and Tennessee (156.9).
Nominated Best Actresses Searches Indicate a Tighter Field
Since July 2005, the most searched on nominated actresses included "Keira Knightly", with searches peaking the week of July 16, 2005, "Charlize Theron", peaking December 3, 2005, and "Felicity Huffman", peaking December 17, 2005. For the week ending January 28, 2006, the most searched on nominated actresses were: "Charlize Theron", followed by "Reese Witherspoon" and "Keira Knightly".
Contact: For media inquiries or to schedule an analyst interview, please contact Lizzie Babarczy: press@hitwise.com (212) 380 2910.
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.com
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