Trade Me in the lead for online Christmas shopping

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Hitwise News Release

Trade Me in the lead for online Christmas shopping

AUCKLAND; October 25, 2005 - In the lead-up to the holiday season, popular Auctions and Classifieds website, TradeMe.co.nz continues to dominate online Shopping and Classifieds activity by New Zealand Internet users, with 47.6% market share for the week ending October 22, 2005.

TradeMe.co.nz poses a significant threat to both online and offline retailers. Its nearest pure-play competitor, eBay (www.ebay.com) accounted for 4.2% market share during the same week. This contrasts with eBay’s dominance in Australia with its local website grabbing 36.7% of Shopping and Classifieds traffic amongst Aussie web surfers.

Last year, online retail reached a peak during the second week of December, with 6.9% share across all categories. Shopping and Classifieds websites have enjoyed explosive growth, with a year-on-year increase of 22.8% in visits to October 2005. This category growth has largely been driven by TradeMe.co.nz.

Hitwise Search Intelligence is able to offer a preview of what Christmas gifts will be favoured this year. Top product terms to the Shopping and Classifieds category in October 2005 included, ‘barbie’, ‘stockings’, ‘lingerie’, ‘ipod’, ‘lego’, ‘books’, ‘my little pony’, ‘music’, ‘dvd’ and ‘games’.

Bricks and Mortar stores which ranked within the Top 30 Shopping and Classifieds websites are set to benefit from pre-Christmas traffic. These include: Dick Smith Electronics (www.dse.co.nz), Real Groovy (www.realgroovy.co.nz), Parallel Imported (www.parallelimported.co.nz), Noel Leeming (www.noelleeming.co.nz), and Pumpkin Patch (www.pumpkinpatch.co.nz).

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 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.co.nz

ENDS

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