Brisbane, CA -- June 1, 2005 -- IGN Entertainment - home to IGN.com®, the web site with the Internet's highest audience composition of unique male visitors aged 18 to 34 - today announced that it has acquired AskMen.com, the Internet's number one male lifestyle web site. The acquisition increases the total reach of IGN's audience by approximately three million visitors and further strengthens the company's position as one of the web's top providers of content and community for the 18-34 male demographic.
"IGN has always been about the gamer and male lifestyle," said Mark Jung, president and CEO of IGN Entertainment. "Adding AskMen.com to our network of properties will allow us to deepen our lifestyle offerings to gamers while giving AskMen.com readers access to the web's best gaming information and community."
AskMen.com, an online resource for men with daily features on subjects such as dating, women, fashion, money, fitness and entertainment, has consistently ranked No. 1 by visits in the "Lifestyle - Men's Sites" category against all other web sites, according to Hitwise. Approximately 85% of AskMen.com's audience is male, and, according to Hitwise, the site enjoys a 26% market share of all web visits to men's lifestyle sites - more than MaximOnline.com, MensHealth.com and GQ (men.style.com), combined.
AskMen.com reached a worldwide audience of 3.8 million in March 2005, and the combined, unduplicated audience for IGN Entertainment and AskMen that same month would have totaled 27.0 million, according to comScore Media Metrix™. In addition, when AskMen.com releases its annual "Top 99 Most Desirable Women" feature every January, the site's traffic spikes to record levels. In January 2005, AskMen.com reached 5.1 million unique visitors and generated 58 million page views, according to comScore Media Metrix.
"Our aim has always been to provide high quality content that is useful, practical and entertaining," said Ricardo Poupada, President and Editor-in-Chief of AskMen.com. "In joining forces with IGN, we not only will be expanding our reach, but also will be providing our users with even more content, information and services related to the subjects that matter most to men. IGN's resources will enhance our audience's experience on our web site, strengthen the AskMen.com brand, and help firmly establish us as the largest and most complete resource online for men's lifestyle content."
About IGN Entertainment
IGN Entertainment operates many of the Internet's leading destinations for video gaming, entertainment and community targeted at teens and 18-34 year-old males. The company's properties include IGN.com, GameSpy, Rotten Tomatoes, FilePlanet, Direct2Drive, TeamXbox, 3D Gamers, GameSpy Arcade, GameSpy Arena, more than 70 community sites and a vast array of online forums. Collectively, these properties reached over 24 million users worldwide* in the month of March 2005, according to Internet audience measurement firm, comScore Media Metrix. IGN Entertainment is also a leading provider of technology for online game play in video games. The company's paid content, download and game play services are among the most popular game-related subscriptions available on the Internet. The privately held company has its headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, with offices throughout the U.S.
About AskMen.com
AskMen.com is one of the world's leading web sites for men, with 3.8 million unique visitors in March 2005, according to comScore Media Metrix*. A foremost content provider with an archive of over 11,000 articles available for free online, AskMen.com updates daily and features over 200 new articles a month across a variety of sections: Dating & Love, Sexuality, Celebrity Profiles & Interviews, Health & Sports, Fashion & Lifestyle, Power & Money, and Entertainment. AskMen.com also publishes daily features such as the Cool Site of the Day, Joke of the Day, Fact of the Day, Quote of the Day, Question of the Day, Video of the Day, and Gadget of the Day. The annual Top 99 Most Desirable Women feature is a popular draw on the site. AskMen.com hosts an active and popular online community with over 25,000 members. AskMen.com has had content partnerships with the likes of MSN, AOL, Netscape, CompuServe, Univision, Overture, Lycos Asia, and more.