• by May 11, 2001

One of the Internet's most visited Web portals, MSN, has selected Digital Island to deliver all of its online ads. Digital Island yesterday announced a new agreement with MSN to deliver more than 860 million ads per day worldwide, including ads on MSN eShop, Search and Hotmail, as well as on the MSNBC.com websites and MSN's Instant Messenger service.

Due to the costly expense of serving ads and installing and maintaining ad servers worldwide, MSN selected Digital Island's Footprint(r) Content Delivery service to decrease costs and increase the performance of ads being served. Digital Island will deliver ads to more than 230 million unique visitors per month in 33 markets in 17 languages, making MSN the Internet's number one destination with the broadest global presence.

The announcement marks an expansion of the existing relationship between Digital Island and Microsoft, with Digital Island already providing Internet infrastructure services including content delivery, application services and live and on-demand streaming services.

According to AdRelevance online ad impressions in December 2000 reached an all-time high of over 65 billion click-throughs. The firm also cited MSN as dominating in terms of revenue and impressions, generating $180 million during December 2000. MSN's advertising business continues to thrive in 2001, with ad sales significantly outpacing the overall online advertising industry's growth, according to MSN.