HITWISE UK SOCIAL NETWORKING UPDATE

Facebook visits up 20 times year-on-year as the current darling of social networking enters top 20 websites in UK.

London, 11th April 2007

Today's redesign of the homepage for Facebook comes at a busy time for the social network. According to Hitwise, the leader in online competitive intelligence, Facebook (www.facebook.com) became the 20^th most visited website based on share of UK Internet visits for the week ending 7^th April 2007.

Hitwise reports that Facebook's share of UK Internet visits grew 20 times year-on-year in March and up seven-fold since early October, when Facebook ranked at #197 of all sites in the UK. The social network's decision to expand registration to allow anyone to network on the site has had a clear impact on its popularity, however the social networking space in the UK continues to be dominated by MySpace and Bebo, who were the #7 and #8 most visited websites respectively in the UK last week.

"The site's popularity has been fuelled in part by the elimination of barriers to entry, with visits rocketing since the fully expanded registration was introduced", commented Heather Hopkins, VP of Research for Hitwise UK. "Facebook has also added features to encourage its members to be active by introducing a form of peer pressure through alerts of changes to friend's profiles".

As Facebook's popularity has grown, so has its brand recognition. Searches for a brand name offer a strong indicator of awareness, and searches for "facebook" have more than doubled in the past month, with the term becoming the 13^th highest volume search term in the UK in the four weeks to 7^th April 2007. However, visitors to Facebook are spending less time on the site than on other leading social networks. Last week, the average session duration on Facebook was 14 minutes 17 seconds, less than half that for Bebo at 32 minutes 22 seconds and less than MySpace at 25 minutes 6 seconds. As with MySpace and Bebo users, UK visitors to Facebook show little loyalty to a single social network. Last week, 8% of the site's visits came from MySpace, the #3 source of visits to Facebook and 2% came from Bebo, the #5 source of visits.

The demographic and lifestyle profile of visitors to Facebook reveals that the social network continues to draw strength from its roots in universities. Last week 57% of UK visits came from those aged 18-24, more than three times that for MySpace. Facebook also attracts a wealthier profile of visitor compared with MySpace and Bebo, with the MOSAIC™ groups Symbols of Success, Suburban Comfort and Rural Isolation all over-indexed on Facebook relative to the online population.

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 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 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, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence Analyst Weblogs at weblogs.hitwise.com.

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Jannie Cahill
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