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Hannah Montana Most Searched for Halloween Costume

BuyCostumes.com the Most Visited Costume Website

NEW YORK, NY – October 25, 2007 – The search term “hannah montana costume” was the most popular among all U.S. Internet searches that contained the phrase “costume” for the week ending October 20, 2007 according to Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service.

The websites receiving the most traffic from the term “hannah montana costume” were Costumzee.com, PriceGrabber.com, Celebrate Express, Target.com and Shopzilla. Other popular costume searches included Halo 3’s Master Chief, pirates, Wonder Woman, Little Red Riding Hood, and Tinkerbell. The top descriptive search terms used for Halloween costumes include perennial favorites such as sexy, funny, homemade and cool. Also among the popular descriptive searches were “cheap halloween costume ideas” which increased 305 percent and the term “adult halloween costume” which increased 336 percent versus last year.  

“Retailers no longer have to guess at what the hot costumes will be for Halloween,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. “Thanks to the availability of Internet search data, we have indications as to the most popular costumes months in advance.”

Top Visited Online Costume Retail Websites

Buycostumes.com was the most visited website amongst a custom category of 22 leading online costume retailers for the week ending October 20, 2007. The website received 34 percent of all U.S. traffic to the custom category. Following Buycostumes.com was the Halloween Express website, which received 11.5 percent of visits, and the Spirit Halloween website was next receiving 11.1 percent. Additionally, Buycostumes.com was the most visited website in the Shopping and Classifieds – Apparel and Accessories category for the same week.

Furthermore, traffic to the top 22 websites in this custom category increased 2 percent for the week ending October 20, 2007 versus the same week last year. 

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About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world 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 behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com 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 http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.