Akamai Releases Data on Advertisers' Web Traffic Volume

Traffic to advertiser websites remains high this morning, with close to 300,000 visitors per minute, showing continued interest in Web ad campaigns promoted on-air last night

Akamai Technologies, Inc., the leading global service provider for accelerating content and business processes online, released web traffic trends via its Akamai Net Usage Index for Advertising (www.akamai.com/netusageindex) tracking real-time Web interest resulting from last night's nationally-televised Super Bowl®. Akamai delivered the websites of the majority of the national advertisers for this year's game to support their corresponding online advertising campaigns.

The Akamai Net Usage Index for Advertising shows Web traffic to an anonymous aggregate of 21 of Akamai customer sites that integrated their broadcast advertising campaigns with an online component. Akamai's Index is the only online tool to offer a real-time look at the immediate effectiveness of advertising campaigns and their corresponding Web call to actions. The Akamai Net Usage Index for Advertising shows total visitors per minute to a collection of advertisers' sites delivered by Akamai, including Anheuser-Busch, GoDaddy.com® and Garmin.

Game-Time Web Traffic Trends

- Average traffic to these sites for the 2-3 weeks before the game was around 80,000 visitors per minute
- During most of the game, Web traffic averaged around 160,000 visitors per minute
- Right before halftime, at about 7:45 p.m., a spike resulted of 227,957 visitors per minute
- 210,893 of those visitors came from the U.S.
- The largest spike came during the last 15 minutes of the game, where traffic jumped to 282,546 visitors per minute
- Traffic today is higher than last night, with close to 300,000 visitors per minute visiting these sites, as of early Monday morning
- Advertisers who specifically directed people to websites in their ads saw the most immediate website traffic

"Multi-channel advertisements are just one part of the convergence between TV and Internet audiences, bringing rich, interactive video content to the Internet and engaging consumers for an extended period of time," said Brad Rinklin, vice president of marketing at Akamai. "With this, scalability and technology infrastructure become critical, especially to support traffic spikes during large-scale advertising campaigns. While investing millions of dollars in high-end TV commercials, companies must extend and leverage these assets across new channels - and ensure reliability and a positive user experience via a digital media platform."

Organizations often face conflicting technology challenges as they move business processes to the Internet to increase revenues, expand into new markets, streamline operations, enhance productivity, and ensure customer satisfaction. Confronted with the need to consolidate infrastructure to avoid the cost of global data center build-out, enterprises also must ensure users, customers, partners, and employees experience good performance, regardless of what online application they are trying to reach and where they are located worldwide. The acquisition of Netli, when completed, is expected to further establish Akamai as the leading managed service in the application acceleration space. Akamai's managed service provides customers an effective alternative to deploying costly and often ineffective hardware to improve performance of Internet applications.

"We are very encouraged by customer acceptance of our application acceleration services, and believe the alignment of Akamai and Netli will provide enterprises with even better solutions going forward in this important and emerging market," said Paul Sagan, president and CEO of Akamai. "Akamai and Netli both emphasize leading-edge technology to help businesses deliver more effective, higher performing online applications, and we are confident that this combination will benefit our customers, employees, and shareholders."

"By joining forces with Akamai to address the large and quickly expanding application acceleration market, we believe our customers will gain access to an even larger global network and a wider portfolio of leading-edge services supported by a combination of the most experienced providers in the industry," said Gary Messiana, CEO of Netli. "Our people are very proud of our pioneering work to deliver proven and effective technology in the area of optimizing online application acceleration, and we look forward to working with Akamai to combine our technology and capabilities to create the strongest managed service offering in the industry."

Under terms of the agreement, Akamai will acquire all of the outstanding equity of Netli in exchange for approximately 3.2 million shares of Akamai common stock, subject to certain closing adjustments. The merger transaction is expected to be accounted for by Akamai under the purchase method of accounting - Akamai.