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6.7 percent of mobile subscribers access Yahoo! branded services compared with 4.4 percent for second- place AOL

SEATTLE, Wash January 30, 2006 — M:Metrics, the mobile market authority, has found that Yahoo! is the most popular mobile content brand. During the quarter ended December 2005 12.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers accessed Yahoo's services in an average month - 4 million more than second-place AOL. MSN and Google follow, with about 7 million subscribers accessing their mobile offerings each month during the fourth quarter.

AOL owes its second-place position to its strength in mobile instant messaging (IM). About 89 percent of its mobile reach is comprised of users of AIM service. Yahoo! users are more likely to access other services, such as news, maps and search in addition to Yahoo IM, which is used by 73 percent of those who used Yahoo! branded services.

"AOL owes its strong position in the mobile domain to its ability to provide seamless access to AIM buddy lists on handsets through an elegantly designed service and its strong relationships with mobile carriers," observed Mark Donovan, vice president, products and senior analyst. "Its challenge is to demonstrate that it can use AIM as the foundation to engage users with a broader base of services, much as it is seeking to do on the desktop by opening access to its portal and e-mail services and linking these with AIM."

ESPN is the most popular source for news among mobile content users, claiming 4.9 million unique users in an average month during the fourth quarter. Interestingly, Yahoo! is on par with CNN as a source of news on the Wireless Web with about 4.5 million subscribers visiting each property on a monthly basis. The Weather Channel is the top source for weather, and Yahoo!, which places second in the Weather category, has twice the audience of Accuweather or Google.

In the bourgeoning market segment of mobile search, Google has extended its dominance on the Web to mobile, but only narrowly, with Yahoo! coming in a close second among the 8.9 million people who used mobile search in December.

Conversely, in the area of maps and directories, Yahoo edges Google and Mapquest, but by a slim margin.

"Although these are early days in mobile media, the aggressive efforts in mobile by Yahoo! and AOL are paying off," said Donovan. "But it is a close race, and as traditional media brands put more muscle into their mobile businesses, we expect that the market will shift."

Mobile Content Brand Reach
Weather Brand Subscribers (000s)
The Weather Channel/Weather.com 4,127
Yahoo! 2,813
Google 1,513
Accuweather 1,300
Weatherbug 1,161

News Brand Subscribers (000s)
ESPN Sports News 4,934
Yahoo! 4,599
CNN/cnn.com 4,514
Fox Sports 2,462
ABCNews.com 2,189

Search Brand Subscribers (000s)
Google 4,538
Yahoo! 3,975
MSN Mobile/MSNBC 1,324
AOL Mobile 1,039
Don't Know 582

Map/Directory Service Brand Subscribers (000s)
Yahoo! 3,793
Mapquest 3,048
Google 3,03
Yellow Pages 2,128
Moviefone 1,907

Source: M:Metrics, Inc. Copyright 2006. Three-month moving average ending December 31, 2005, n=35,056.

M:Metrics surveys 12,000 to 14,000 U.S. mobile subscribers monthly to report on the consumption of mobile content and applications and benchmark the performance of carrier, device manufacturers, mobile content publishers and technology providers. The following are the results of its December Benchmark Survey.

US Mobile Subscriber Monthly Consumption of Content and Applications
M:Metrics Benchmark Survey: December 2005
Activity Projected Monthly
Reach (000s) Percent US
Mobile Subscribers Change
Sent or Received Text Message 60,983 33.32% 4.6%
Retrieved News and Information Via Browser 18,572 10.15% 0.1%
Purchased Ringtone 17,675 9.66% 7.3%
Used Photo Messaging 17,005 9.29% 9.4%
Used Personal E-mail 13,454 7.35% 9.4%
Used Mobile Instant Messenger 11,568 6.32% 10.5%
Used Work E-mail 7,886 4.31% 12.8%
Purchased Wallpaper or Screensaver 7,176 3.92% 8.5%
Downloaded Mobile Game 6,052 3.31% 6.5%
Source: M:Metrics, Inc., Copyright 2006. Survey of U.S. mobile subscribers. Data based on three-month moving average for period ending December 31, 2005, n= 35,056.