The film industry may be experiencing a slump in theatergoers, but movie websites are seeing boosts in traffic thanks to advertising on portals like Yahoo and MSN, writes DM News. An ad campaign on Hotmail was the primary source of a jump in visits to the "Batman Begins" official movie site, according to clickstream data for June 18 from Hitwise, New York. An estimated 83 percent of visits that day originated from www.hotmail.com, compared with 4 percent the previous day.

Meanwhile, an ad campaign on Yahoo generated 57 percent of visits to the site of the movie "The Longest Yard." Hitwise said the market share of the LongestYard.com on May 27 jumped 1,192 percent compared with the prior Friday. And MySpace generated 53 percent of the visits to the site of "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," visits to which rose 396 percent on June 3, versus the prior Friday.