Human Face of War Drives Online Compassion

The Human Face of War Drives Online Compassion Amongst Kiwi's

As war intensifies in Iraq, so too has New Zealand compassion for the victims of war. Since the beginning of the year, Hitwise statistics have demonstrated a massive 54% increase in traffic to Humanitarian websites. In particular, humanitarian online category saw its biggest increase in market share over the past week.

According to Hitwise' SVP Tessa Court, "For the first couple of days of war, we have been inundated with faceless, 'video game' images of bombs being launched, and buildings going up in flames. As we're now starting to see images of body bags, wounded civilians and the human face of war, people worldwide are going online to find out how they can help."

The most popular humanitarian websites New Zealanders visited on March 23rd were:

Today's Ranking #2 - United Nations - http://www.un.org/ (more than 5.5% of all visits "bookmarked" this website, indicating an intention to return).

Today's Ranking #3 - AlertNet - http://www.alertnet.org/

Today's Ranking #4 - Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations - http://www.fao.org/ (This site didn't even manage to rank the day before due to lack of traffic then rose to an amazing 4th position.

One of the fastest moving websites over the past week has been United Nations Children's Fund - http://www.unicef.org/ which rose to 4th position over the past 24 hours. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) works for the survival, development and protection of children worldwide. The UNICEF site talks about the organisation, its programs and how to participate.

Hitwise Clickstream statistics demonstrated that much of the traffic going to the http://www.unicef.org/ www.un.org website originated from the website BBC News http://www.news.bbc.co.uk. Likewise, of the visitors leaving this website, many were going directly to United Nations Statistics Division website http://www.unstats.un.org.

ABOUT HITWISE

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service giving strategists, agencies and financial analysts real-time insights on the online competitive environment. Hitwise uses ISP user activity logs and other data sources to monitor the surfing habits of local Internet users, covering home, work and educational usage. Monitoring the largest sample of Internet users of its kind in the world, Hitwise provides daily insights all companies need to make timely and effective business decisions.

Hitwise is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and offers its service in

New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore and the USA.

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