SAN FRANCISCO, May 10, 2001 - One of the Internet's most visited Web portals, MSN, has selected Digital Island (NASDAQ: ISLD) to deliver all of its online advertisements. Digital Island today 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 Web sites 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 Footprintâ 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.

Today's 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, a Jupiter Media Matrix Company, online ad impressions in December 2000 reached an all-time high of over 65 billion deliveries. 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.

"Digital Island's network operations, reporting and content delivery capabilities, as well as engineering expertise, are what we need in order to keep up with demand so that MSN can continue to drive revenue and facilitate e-commerce through online advertisements," said David Walters, senior operations manager, MSN. "By outsourcing to Digital Island, we have the ability to scale when necessary very easily, and are saving a significant amount of money on infrastructure and maintenance costs."

"Digital Island provides MSN with a fast and guaranteed method of delivering hundreds of millions of revenue-generating ads in the most cost-effective and efficient manner possible," said Tim Wilson, chief marketing officer, Digital Island Inc. "By supporting MSN's growing and expanding advertising business, Digital Island is enabling MSN to save significantly on build-out and IT costs, and focus on its value-added solutions."
 

About Digital Island
Digital Island is the leading provider of managed Internet infrastructure for enterprises that need to give their customers a great Web experience in order to drive e-Business transactions. The company integrates managed hosting, content delivery and network services to bypass Internet congestion and guarantee fast and relevant interactions. Digital Island is headquartered in San Francisco, and its global e-Business delivery network reaches 35 countries. www.digitalisland.net

Important Notice
Digital Island and Footprint are registered trademarks of Digital Island, Inc. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

This press release contains information about the plans, objectives and expectations of the management of the Company that may constitute forward-looking statements. Important factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements, include but are not limited to: the operational difficulty of developing, deploying and delivering the Company's complex range of products and services; the potential lack of market acceptance of such products and services; competition from presently existing and new competitors; the risks associated with international operations and expansion; delays in raising or the unavailability of additional capital to fund operating losses and capital investment, the possibility of decreased growth in demand for Internet services in general and other factors detailed in the Company's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company assumes no duty to update information contained in this press release.