Strong growth in annual agreements for Scandinavia Online: SOL - signs new annual agreement with Active ISP

Strong growth in annual agreements for Scandinavia Online: SOL - SIGNS NEW ANNUAL AGREEMENT WITH ACTIVE ISP Today, Scandinavia Online AB ("SOL") signed an agreement for 2001 with the Norwegian company Active ISP ASA ("Active ISP"), regarding sales of a broad spectrum of advertising products on SOL's portals. The agreement covers Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, and has a total value of NOK 19 million. This is a 5 million increase from the agreement for 2000. The agreement is the largest of several annual agreements that SOL has signed lately. Active ISP is Europe's leading web hosting and domain registration provider and is represented in 15 countries. The company's marketing is almost exclusively net-based and the company is therefore one of the most experienced in the Nordic countries in this area. "We have previously had a good partnership with SOL and our marketing activities on their portals have given good response", says Rolf Larsen, Managing Director of Active ISP. He believes that the volume increase in the agreement compared to year 2000 is a result of earlier experience with the portal network, as well as the fact that SOL has substantially increased its user base during year 2000. "Naturally, more users make the portal more interesting to us, therefore we allocate more marketing to SOL in 2001", Larsen continues and adds that, through this deal, Active ISP expects higher growth and at the same time lower acquisition costs per customer. The agreement with Active ISP is the largest of several annual agreements that SOL has signed during the last weeks. SOL has high ambitions for the advertisement sales in year 2001 and the annual agreements are important to attain that goal. "We register a substantial increase from last year on the agreements signed so far", says Birger Steen, CEO of Scandinavia Online. Steen explains that this is due to SOL's strong development in number of users in 2000, combined with a generally higher usage of the Internet. This makes the advertising on the Internet an even more important part of the advertisers' marketing activities. "We see that more people choose SOL, as it is the leading portal network in the Nordic countries, at times when there is a turbulence in the market", Birger Steen concludes. For more information, please contact: Thomas Ranje, CFO, Scandinavia Online AB, +46 709 41 54 94, thomas.ranje@scandinaviaonline.se Kristin Skogen Lund, Managing Director, Scandinavia Online AS, +47 40 21 39 45, kristlun@a.sol.no Rolf Larsen, Managing Director, Active ISP ASA, +47 21 93 30 09, rolf@activeisp.com Active ISP - the leading pan-European Internet-hosting company - provides complete solutions for web hosting, e-commerce, e-mail, domain name registration, database solutions, dedicated servers and applications hosting. (ASP). Active ISP has 140 employees and is represented in Great Britain, France, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, USA as well as Norway, and is one of Europe's largest Internet-hosting companies on the SMB-market. ------------------------------------------------------------ This information was brought to you by BIT http://www.bit.se The following files are available for download: http://www.bit.se/bitonline/2001/05/28/20010528BIT00760/bit0002.doc http://www.bit.se/bitonline/2001/05/28/20010528BIT00760/bit0002.pdf