Wednesday, July 11, 2001

Top Web And Digital Media Properties For June 2001

Jupiter Media Metrix (NASDAQ: JMXI), the global leader in Internet and new technology analysis and measurement, today released the Media Metrix US Top 50 Web and Digital Media property ratings for June 2001.

Top 50 "Pop-Up and Pop-Under" Activity
eBay Sites - Rose from number 12 in May to number 8 in Media Metrix's June Top 50 ranking, with 23.3 million Unique Visitors, a 21 percent increase over the previous month. This increase is primarily caused by a 66 percent increase in Half.com's unique visitors (Half.com is owned by eBay) from 5.8 to 9.7 million as a result of its pop-up campaign. Half.com deployed pop-up pages from MyPoints and the New York Times Web sites.

Real.com Network - Increased 17 percent from 12.1 million unique visitors in May 2001 to 14.2 million in June, as a result of Real.com's pop-up campaign, launched in June. Real's pop-ups accounted for approximately one million of its total unique visitors.

Colonize.com - Increased 19 percent in unique visitors and rose to number 27, with just under 10 million unique visitors. This increase is in part the result of its pop-up campaign, primarily deployed through Yahoo! sites. While Colonize increased its pop-up campaign in June, its total advertising impressions decreased significantly during the same period.

"Media Metrix reports all content with which users interact. This includes pop-up and pop-under Web pages, which spawn new browsers. As an objective, third-party measurement company, Media Metrix has a responsibility to include and report interaction with all legitimate Web pages without bias toward content, business purpose, or method of acquiring viewers," said Doug McFarland, president, Media Metrix, the online ratings division of Jupiter Media Metrix. "It is impossible to determine whether a user intended to visit a site that is also accessible through pop-up or pop-under pages. Truly objective audience measurement cannot be influenced by what a user may or may not have intended to do online."

X10.com's pop-up and pop-under online advertising strategy continues to push the site up in Media Metrix's rankings, from number five in May 2001 to number four in June 2001. Top sources of traffic to X10.com in June 2001 were: MSN.com, contributing 9.1 million unique visitors; Weather.com, contributing 4.1 million unique visitors; Fastclick.net with 2.8 million unique visitors; and Yahoo.com with 2.5 million unique visitors. However, according to a new Jupiter Research Concept report, 73 percent of its 28.6 million unique visitors left the site or window within 20 seconds in May 2001 and a mere 2.7 million unique visitors actually clicked on the pop-under window or visited the x10.com site (Media Metrix does not report page usage lasting less than two seconds).

"At first glance, x10.com's 10 percent conversion rate appears impressive," said Marissa Gluck, analyst, Jupiter Media Metrix. "However, x10.com's number of engaged shoppers, defined as visitors who have spent at least 3 minutes on the site, is only 1.2 million, further decreasing its conversion rate to 4.2 percent."