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Pirates Most Popular Costume Search This Halloween

Online Searches for Adult Costumes Up 209%

October 26, 2006

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Online intelligence service Hitwise reports that that "pirate costumes" was the most popular costume specific search term, capturing .24 percent of all search terms containing the word "costume," for the four weeks ending October 21, 2006.

The next most popular costume related search terms were "tinkerbell costume" and then "wonder woman costume". The search term "jack sparrow costume" followed due in part to the success of the movie, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man"s Chest."

A new trend noticed is that the share of US searches for the term "adult costumes" was up 209 percent for the four weeks ending October 21, 2006 versus the same four week period in 2005 (four weeks ending October 22, 2005).

In addition, the share of searches for "sexy Halloween costume" was up 400 percent in the same period. Among the top 10 most popular costume searches with US Internet searchers include those more suitable for adults such as "playboy bunny costume" and "dog the bounty hunter costume".

Halloween is proving to be big business for online retailers as more adults seek to join children in the yearly tradition of donning costumes. This is reflected in that BuyCostumes.com was the most visited website within our Shopping and Classifieds – Apparel and Accessories category for the week ending October 21, 2006.

Hitwise custom data on the top 30 online costume retailers showed a 38.5 percent increase in market share of visits to the category for the week ending October 21, 2006 versus the same week last year (week ending October 22, 2005).

The leading online costume retailer was BuyCostumes.com, which captured 30.5 percent of category visits for the week ending October 21, 2006. Annie"s Costumes (www.anniescostumes.com) was the second most popular costume website in that period, with 7.01 percent market share, followed by multi-channel retailer Spirit Halloween (www.spirithalloween.com) at 7.0 percent.

"The strong year-over-year increase in visits to Halloween retailers shows that consumers have integrated online shopping into their holiday and event planning more than ever before," said LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise. "This data bodes well for online retailers as they prepare for the Christmas 2006 shopping season."

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