Nearly 2 Million New Zealanders Spent an Average of 20 Hours per Person on the Internet in March

Comscore Measures New Zealanders’ Online Behavior at All Internet Sites: Microsoft Edges Google as Most Popular New Zealand Internet Property

London, UK, April 25, 2007 -- Comscore, a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study from its World Metrix database analyzing the behavior of New Zealand’s online population. The study is based on data collected from Comscore’s research panel of New Zealanders who have given Comscore explicit permission to monitor their online activities us ing Comscore’s patented monitoring technology. Unlike other services which only measure activity on sites that cooperate by installing software on their servers – therefore painting an incomplete picture of the online world – Comscore’s technology is able to measure users’ behavior at all Internet sites.

In March 2007, 1.9 million New Zealanders age 15 or older used the Internet, viewing 3.6 billion pages of content. The average Internet user went online every other day and spent a total of 20.4 hours online during the month.

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Top New Zealand Sites

Comscore also revealed New Zealanders’ most popular sites, ranked by the number of unique visitors age 15 and older in March 2007. Three of the top five sites are U.S.-based companies, including Microsoft Sites (with 1.42 million visitors from New Zealand), Google Sites (with 1.39 million visitors), and Yahoo! Sites (with 1.1 million visitors). New Zealand-based Trademe.co.nz and Govt.nz round out the top five, garnering 977,000 and 621,000 visitors, respectively.

*Ranking based on the top 200 New Zealand properties in March 2007; a property is the highest level of reporting, representing all full domains, pages, applications or online services under common ownership or majority ownership for a single legal entity.
** Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

“Independent third-party measurement of the size of site audiences is critical to the development of advertising on the Internet, just as it is in TV or print,” commented Ian Smith, CEO of Yahoo! 7 and interim CEO of Yahoo! Xtra. “Though tags and server logs are useful, they require the cooperation of all sites if they are to represent the entire market – and that cooperation is not forthcoming. Moreover, these methodologies often overstate true audience size due to cookie deletion. Consequently, Yahoo! supports panel-based audience measurement and Comscore’s robust sample gives us the accuracy and visibility into the entire market that we need to help build our business.”

About Comscore’s New Zealand Panel

Comscore has built a research panel of more than 5,000 New Zealanders who have given their explicit permission to allow Comscore to continuously monitor their online activities. This panel was recruited to be representative of the online population in New Zealand age 15+ accessing the Internet from a home or work computer. The benefit of a panel based approach (versus a site-centric tagging approach) is that it does not require the cooperation of site operators and provides a measure of visitation to all sites – not just the ones that cooperate. In March 2007, Comscore was able to report on visitation behavior by New Zealanders across more than 1,000 Internetsites.

About Comscore World Metrix

Comscore World Metrix is the first service to continuously measure and report online behaviour on a world-wide basis, providing visitation metrics and demographic characteristics for Web site audiences around the world. With active representation of countries that comprise the vast majority of the global Internet population, World Metrix provides its clients with worldwide Internet population estimates and harmonized online performance metrics based on a consistent methodology across all countries. More than 100 companies subscribe to Comscore’s World Metrix service, including 8 of the top 10 interactive advertising agencies.

About Comscore

Comscore, Inc. is a leader in measuring the digital world. This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given Comscore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior. Comscore panelists also participate in survey research that captures and integrates their attitudes and intentions. Through its proprietary technology, Comscore measures what matters across a broad spectrum of behavior and attitudes. Comscore consultants apply this deep knowledge of customers and competitors to help clients design powerful marketing strategies and tactics that deliver superior ROI. Comscore services are used by global leaders such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Verizon, Best Buy, The Newspaper Association of America, Tribune Interactive, ESPN, Fox Sports, Nestlé, MBNA, Starcom USA, Universal McCann, Merck and Expedia. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com.

Press
Bill Daddi
Daddi Brand Communications
646-370-1341
press@comscore.com