Nielsen//NetRatings Reports First-Ever Global Rankings of Top Ad Banners

Business Wire, August 15, 2000

Business Editors, Internet Writers

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STAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 15, 2000

Inaugural Look at Web Advertising Worldwide

Shows Strong Efforts by US Advertisers and Global

Properties to Reach Local Web Audiences

New Zealand and Ireland Lead the World in

Click Rates for Ad Banners

Nielsen//NetRatings, the world's fastest growing Internet audience measurement service, today released the first-ever rankings of the top ad banners in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results showed a strong advertising presence by global web properties, and a correlation between advertising by global properties and the top-ranked property in each country.

Nielsen//NetRatings is a service provided by ACNielsen eRatings.com (a venture between ACNielsen Corp., NYSE: ART and NetRatings, Inc., Nasdaq: NTRT), Nielsen Media Research and NetRatings, Inc.

The findings are from Nielsen//NetRatings' unique BannerTrack(SM) service, which reports on top banner ads by impression, domain, and company. Findings for the month of June cover eight major Internet markets worldwide, and reveal heavy ad buys by major Internet companies in most overseas markets. Global properties Yahoo! and MSN ran heavy ad schedules - primarily on their own properties - in Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK (see Table 1). At the same time, those properties ranked first or second in terms of unique audience in each market for the month of June, according to Nielsen//NetRatings' audience measurement service.

"MSN and Yahoo! have dominated the Nielsen//NetRatings global properties rankings. While their success in drawing large local audiences is tied to their careful attention to local content, we cannot discount their heavy advertising, which focuses on such value-added services as instant messaging, sports, travel and shopping pages," said David Day, director of analytical services, ACNielsen eRatings.com. "Their heavy ad banner schedules also show a greater faith in the effectiveness of the Internet as an advertising medium. More traditional brick and mortar companies, who are barely visible in the banner rankings, appear to still be reluctant to target consumers online."