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Contact: Matt Tatham - Hitwise – 1.212.380.2939

Pirates Are Most Popular Costume Search This Halloween Season

Visits to Online Halloween Retailers Up 39 Percent Compared to a Year Ago; Searches for Adult Halloween Costumes up 209% Over Last Year

NEW YORK, NY – October 25, 2006 – Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that 'pirate costumes' was the most popular specific costume related search term capturing .24 percent of all search terms containing the word ‘costume’ for the four weeks ending October 21, 2006.

The next most popular costume related search terms were ‘tinkerbell costume’ and then ‘wonder woman costume’. The search term ‘jack sparrow costume’ followed due in part to the success of the movie, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest”. A new trend noticed is that the share of US searches for the term 'adult costumes' was up 209 percent for the four weeks ending October 21, 2006 versus the same four week period in 2005 (four weeks ending October 22, 2005). In addition, the share of searches for 'sexy Halloween costume' was up 400 percent in the same period. Other popular costumes among the top-10 most popular costume searches with US Internet searchers include those more suitable for adults such as ‘playboy bunny costume’ and ‘dog the bounty hunter costume’.

Top Online Costume Retailers

Halloween is proving to be big business for online retailers as more adults seek to join children in the yearly tradition donning costumes. Hitwise custom data on the top 30 online costume retailers showed a 38.5 percent increase in market share of visits to the category for the week ending October 21, 2006 versus the same week last year (week ending October 22, 2005). The leading online costume retailer was BuyCostumes.com, which captured 30.5 percent of category visits for the week ending October 21, 2006. Annie's Costumes (www.anniescostumes.com) was the second most popular costume website in that period, with 7.01 percent market share, followed by multi-channel retailer Spirit Halloween (www.spirithalloween.com) at 7.0 percent.

“The strong year over year increase in visits to Halloween retailers shows that consumers have integrated online shopping into their holiday and event planning more than ever before,” said LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise. “This data bodes well for online retailers as they prepare for the Christmas 2006 shopping season."

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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