ESPN, Yahoo! and CBS SportsLine Compete For Top Spot Among March Madness Tournament Websites

NEW YORK, NY - March 15, 2007 -  The 2007 NCAA Tournament officially begins today and basketball fans around the country have been scrambling to fill out their brackets in time. According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, ESPN's Men's Tournament Challenge website received the largest percentage of US visits, averaging traffic from Monday and Tuesday of this week, by a small margin over Yahoo! Sports -  Tournament Pick'em website and CBS SportsLine.com - Fantasy Mayhem website.

Session time data indicate that users are spending approximately 15 minutes per visit to fill out brackets on the NCAA tournament pool websites. The average session time for a visit to a site in the Hitwise Sports category for the week ending March 10, 2007 was 7 minutes 41 seconds.

Sports Category Rankings - ESPN Dominates
Tournament pool and college basketball websites were among the most visited websites in the Hitwise Sports category on March 13, 2007. ESPN.com Men's College Basketball ranked at number 4, while its Men's Tournament Challenge page ranked at number 7. ESPN.com held the top spot in the Sports category, with 7.17 percent share on March 13.

Search Term "ncaa brackets" Up 38% Over Last Year
The share of searches on the term "ncaa brackets" increased 604 percent for the week ending March 10, 2007 versus the week ending March 3, 2007. Year over year, searches for "ncaa brackets increased 38 percent (week ending March 10, 2007 vs. week ending March 11, 2006).

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.