Driven by the movie magic of Harry Potter, AOL Moviefone reached a record number of unique users during the fourth quarter. In November, the kick-off of the holiday movie season, Media Metrix recorded 5.7 million unique users, making it not only the busiest month in the seven-year history of Moviefone.com, but the biggest month ever for any movie Web site.

Forty-four percent more moviegoers visited Moviefone.com for showtimes and tickets in November than the next largest movie site. The number of visitors to Moviefone.com from October through December of 2001 increased to 13.4 million unique users, a 75 percent increase over last year's fourth quarter.

The level of interest in Warner Bros. Pictures' Harry Potter movie, combined with a massive marketing campaign across multiple AOL Time Warner properties, propelled Moviefone.com's November usage to a 71 percent increase over October, and a 127 percent increase over the 2.5 million unique visitors recorded by Media Metrix in November 2000.

AOL Moviefone was an integral part of America Online's promotional support of this holiday season's biggest movies, having sold more than one million tickets to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- the most tickets ever sold online for a film -- and also offering online ticketing for other holiday blockbusters including The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Ocean's Eleven, Spy Game, Ali, and many others.

In addition to AOL Moviefone's promotional efforts, AOL also hosted highly successful marketing campaigns such as the "Harry Potter Build a Fan Page" contest, the most successful fan page contest in AOL history, for which more than two thousand unique fan pages were submitted, and the "AOL 7.0/The Lord of the Rings" sweepstakes which drew more than one million entrants, making it one of the most successful sweepstakes ever on AOL.

"In addition to moviegoer interest in holiday blockbuster films, Moviefone.com's record numbers are also the result of its prominent promotion across America Online's family of brands," said Jay Rappaport, senior vice president and group general manager of entertainment at AOL. "AOL Moviefone enables Hollywood studios and other advertisers to reach the largest audience on the Web by delivering Moviefone.com's marketing campaigns and ticket offerings to not only America Online's 33 million subscribers, but also millions of users of additional AOL properties including Netscape, CompuServe, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and others."

This past quarter, AOL Moviefone also launched a new feature, the "AOL Moviefone Top 5 Movies" list, in Variety, a leading publication for the Hollywood community. The feature leverages AOL Moviefone's online audience of moviegoers to give Hollywood industry executives an accurate read on what movies are attracting the most consumer interest and to predict what each weekend's top five grossing movies will likely be.

The list runs in Variety and on Variety.com each Friday and is based on the total number of requests through AOL Moviefone for movie information and showtimes as of Thursday evening. Over the past several months, the "AOL Moviefone Top 5 Movies" lists have accurately predicted the top five movies for the coming weekend 88 percent of the time. Overall, this holiday season's most requested movies were Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Ocean's Eleven, and Vanilla Sky.

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