Irish advertisers spent £6 million (€7.6 million) online in the last 12 months, and the number of websites which accept advertising has grown proportionately.

The third edition of ICAN's Little Red Book, which is a media planners' guide to such websites, is up 100 per cent in terms of the number of entries.

A major change from the first edition is the number of websites that now come with independently audited figures, mostly from ABCe, DART, Nielsen and Webtrends, which is encouraging planners to divert budget to the medium.

Advertisers are most interested in PIPM (page impressions per month) and in ICAN's index of overall traffic. The Irish Times's Ireland.com is by far the busiest website, with nearly 17 million PIPMs. Oceanfree.net comes second with more than five million PIPMs and rte.ie is third at 4.5 million PIPMs (although this is not an independently audited figure and comes directly from the station.)

Bank of Ireland is to sponsor the Special Olympics with a package worth €4.4 million (£3.47 million). Some €3 million will go directly to sponsoring the games and the remainder will be spent on advertising and marketing. It's the largest sponsorship of a single event and the first major one to be announced for the games, which will take place mostly in the greater Dublin area in June 2003.

Mr Denis O'Brien of ESAT is the chairman of the organising committee and it is likely that he will be a major sponsor while his main competitor, Eircom, already sponsors the Irish Special Olympics team. Mr O'Brien is also a member of the board of Bank of Ireland.

It's not exactly Niketown on the scale seen in London and New York, but Nike is dipping its toes in the Dublin retail scene with what it is calling a "shop-in-shop" concept in Marathon's flagship Grafton Street store. The ground floor of the shop has been given over to Nike products with a sophisticated new fit-out and sound system. Marathon Sports is part of the Champion Group, a wholly owned Irish company, which operates nine Marathon Sports stores.