_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

May 21, 2007
Online Health Category Grows 12 Percent With More Than 55 Million Visitors in Q1 2007
WebMD leads the category while QualityHealth.com and other upstart health portals flex their muscles.

RESTON, VA, May 21, 2007 -comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, today released the results of a study on consumer usage of online health information resources. During the first quarter of 2007, the health information category reached an average of 55.3 million monthly U.S. visitors (31 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience), an increase of 12 percent versus the same period last year. WebMD Health led the category with an average of 17.1 million unique visitors per month in Q1 2007 (up 25 percent), followed by NIH.gov with 9.8 million (up 8 percent), MSN Health with 8.1 million (up 1 percent), and Yahoo! Health with 6.7 million (up 83 percent).



Several smaller players have also gained traction in the category during the past year. In Q1 2007, Healthline.com attracted an average of 2.7 million visitors, up 269 percent versus last year, while QualityHealth.com jumped 114 percent to 2.6 million visitors. Meanwhile, recent market entrant RevolutionHealth.com has seen its traffic more than double from 239,000 visitors in January to 486,000 visitors in March.

"While the larger and more established health portals are continuing to grow, the category is being shaken up by a few upstarts," said Carolina Petrini, vice president of pharmaceutical solutions at comScore. "In the past year, both Healthline.com and QualityHealth.com have more than doubled their respective online audiences to nearly 3 million visitors per month, becoming major players in the category. In addition, RevolutionHealth.com comes in with high expectations, so it will be interesting to monitor its ability to compete against the top sites."

Online Health Portal Users Are Loyal to Their Primary Site
Generally speaking, online health portals elicit a high degree of user loyalty, as evidenced by the low degree of cross-visitation that occurs within the category. Among the top health portals, MSN Health had the highest user loyalty with just 16.8 percent of its audience visiting other health portals, followed by Yahoo! Health (17.1 percent) and Healthline.com (20 percent).



Health-Related Search Activity Drives Substantial Traffic
One of the key drivers of traffic to the online health information category is health-related search. Specifically, many consumers begin their navigation by first conducting a search using keywords or phrases for specific conditions or ailments. In Q1, the top health-related search keyword/phrase, "pregnancy," was entered more than 17 million times, followed by "cancer," "flu," and "fitness," each of which generated at least 15 million searches.



About QualityHealth.com
QualityHealth.com is the flagship website of Marketing Technology Solutions (MTS), a performance-based, interactive marketing solutions company. MTS specializes in connecting clients' brands with health-conscious consumers through data-driven patient education, targeted customer acquisition, syndicated research, and permission-based interactive marketing. MTS gains consumer insights through its two nationally ranked consumer websites, QualityHealth.com and Nubella.com, whose 10 million members rely on the sites for health and wellness news, tips, tools, support groups, and patient education.

For more information, contact:
Peter Burch
732-491-8043
pburch@qualityhealth.com

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _