HITWISE UK MEDIA UPDATE 

Freesat proves popular with consumers online 

London, 14 May 2008 - Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today reveals that the launch of Freesat, the free satellite TV service provided by the BBC and ITV in the UK, proved popular with online consumers during its launch week. UK Internet traffic to www.freesat.co.uk, the service's online homepage, increased by 627% between the weeks ending May 3rd and May 10th 2008, while UK Internet searches for the term 'freesat' increased by 752% over the same period, making it the fastest moving search term in the UK last week.

The launch of Freeesat adds to the growing popularity of additional services from traditional broadcasters in the UK. iPlayer, the BBC's online video catch up service, has seen its UK Internet traffic more than treble since it was officially launched over Christmas, and the website is now the 35th most visited in the UK. Similarly, searches for ITV's recently re-launched ITV Catch Up service have nearly trebled over the last month.

Freesat appeals to an older demographic than Sky

There were 79% more searches for the term 'freesat' than the term 'sky' during the week ending May 10th. "This is to be expected for a new product that has received a lot of media attention "over a fifth of Internet traffic to Freesat's website came from news and media sites during its launch period," commented Robin Goad, Hitwise's Director of Research. "Last week Sky's homepage (www.sky.com) still received 250% more internet visits than www.freesat.co.uk, but the type of visitor was quite different. While Sky's website's core audience is people in cities aged between 25 and 44, Freesat is proving more popular with older, more rural viewers."

Two thirds of visitors to www.sky.com are aged 45 or under, whereas for Freesat the comparable figure is 43%. Freesat appeals to an older audience: 43% of visitors to its website last week were aged 55 and over, compared with just 20% for Sky. Freesat also appeals more to people living in rural areas such as the South West, but is less popular than Sky in larger cities, particularly in London and the North West.

 Electronics retailers and manufacturers receive Freesat boost 

The interest in Freesat also helped boost traffic to electronics retailers and manufacturers last week. 35% of people visiting the Freesat website chose to visit a retailer afterwards, while a further 10% went to electronics manufacturers' websites. Argos (www.argos.co.uk) received the most traffic of any retailer from Freesat, accounting for 16% of all downstream visits from www.freesat.co.uk. The site that received the second largest amount of traffic from www.freesat.co.uk was Humax (www.humaxdigital.com), the British electronics manufacturer that is producing one of the Freesat set top boxes. Freesat accounted for 44% of Humax's traffic last week, helping increase visit to the site by 467%.

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 behaviour 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 Hitwise.

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