Contact: Matt Tatham - Hitwise - 1.212.380.2939

Fred Thompson the Top Visited Candidate Last Week

Ron Paul received the most traffic from Web 2.0 websites in August

NEW YORK, NY- September 12, 2007 - Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson’s website, www.fred08.com, was the most visited website among all presidential candidates for the week ending September 8, 2007. Fred08.com received 34 percent of US visits amongst all the presidential candidate websites for that week.

Barack Obama’s website, www.barackobama.com, received 13.49 percent of US visits for last week, the second most visits among all candidates. Following Obama’s website was Republican candidate Ron Paul‘s website www.ronpaul2008.com, which received 12.88 percent of visits.

Visitors to Fred Thompson’s site were primarily Male (65.56 percent) and older (40.28 percent being 55 or older) during the four weeks ending September 8, 2007. Of all traffic to Fred08.com, 10.86 percent of it came from Tennesseeonline users.

Web 2.0 Election

The traffic from select Web 2.0 websites including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, increased 205 percent to all the candidate websites in August 2007 compared to January 2007. Republican Ron Paul received the most traffic from Web 2.0 websites followed by Democrat candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

"The online focus of the last presidential election was all about blogs and their effectiveness in communicating with potential voters," said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. "In the 2008 Presidential election, the Internet's role is changing from a one way communication channel to a two-way conversation enabled by social networking."

Other stats on presidential candidate’s websites can be found on the Hitwise Election 2008 data, located at: http://www.hitwise.com/political-data-center.

About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive Web sites, 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 ISP’s 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 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, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.