Amazon – $34,204,000,000 $1,084 per second
Founded in 1994 and currently employing 33,700 people,
Amazon.com remains the world’s largest online retailers, with the highest
revenue of any company on this list. Selling an assortment of products across
the world in countries as far as the UK ,
Austria , Japan and China , Amazon is no longer just an
online retailer, they’re the head of a very large family of companies such as
IMDb, Lovefilm, Zappos and Alexa. There’s no doubt that Amazon has made a huge
difference with where we shop in the last 15 years, with the closest website
runner up in sales being Staples with less than a third of the sales of Amazon.
Google - $29,321,000,000 $929 per second
Google’s ability to come in and create instantly popular
features such as Google+, make it a force to be reckoned with for any website.
The current leader in internet traffic is Facebook, so Google recently came out
with their answer to that; ‘Google+’. Starting out in 1996 as a research
project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google grew into most users ‘go-to’ site
for searching the internet, and their user friendly mottos of ‘to organize the
world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ and perhaps
more importantly ‘Don’t be evil’, has helped them to become the globally
recognised brand that they are today.
eBay - $9,156,000,000 $290 per second
Founded back in 1995 (beginning to see a pattern emerging
here) by Pierre Omidyar, this is without a doubt the best and most successful
alternative to traditional online shopping, where you can effectively cut out
retailer to buy and sell between user and user, cutting costs and raising money
for unwanted goods. Founded in 1995, eBay has acquired 35 companies in the past
13 years including 6 online auction sites in the US ,
South Korea , India , France
and Sweden ,
ensuring that they’re the no.1 name in online actions. They’ve even used some
of the money that they’ve raised in the past to buy companies like Skype,
before selling them for profit.
Yahoo! - $6,324,000,000 $200 per second
We often think of Yahoo! as the company that could never
quite keep up with Google, even though it’s 2 years older, yet Yahoo! is so
much more. At no.4 on this list, it has a mammoth revenue, and the site covers
many similar areas to Google, only just not as well. Yahoo! was founded back in
March of 1995 and they certainly have their fingers in a lot of pies, acquiring
over 60 different companies in the last 16 years. As far as search engine
traffic goes, I get 64 times the amount of traffic from Google, so it is in
fact these acquisitions and ventures that make them a hell of a lot of money,
not their search engine.
Alibaba - $5,557,600,000 $176 per second
Alibaba is the ultimate business-to-business tool and brings
together importers and exporters from more than 240 countries and regions, all
in one place. Alibaba focuses on facilitating trade between users across the
world, and AliExpress focuses on smaller transactions between buyers and
sellers worldwide. With 65 million registered users in more than 240 countries
and offices in more than 70 locations worldwide, they’re the market leader in
online world goods trade.
Expedia, Inc. - $3,348,000,000 $106 per second
Founded in 1996 as a division of Microsoft, Expedia, Inc.
own a range of travel brands from Hotels.com to Tripadvisor, and their massive
affiliate network has boosted their revenue to an all time high in recent
years. Back in 2008, Fortune labeled Expedia one of the top 3 most admired
internet companies, and one of the best managed companies in the same year. In
the 15 years that they’ve been around, they’ve become the 1-stop shop for
booking a holiday, covering every aspect of travel, and making them no.1 in the
online travel industry.
Priceline – $3,072,240,000 $97 per second
Priceline specialise in facilitating the sale of flights,
hotels, cars, vacation and cruises and are famous for their ‘name your own
price’ system. In this system, travellers would name the price they wanted to
pay, the service level they wanted and the general location, but, the companies
used, exact location of hotels and flight itineraries were only revealed once
the purchase had gone through and the customer had no right to cancel. It’s an
unusual idea, but it seems to have done very well for them and their celebrity
endorsers. William Statner, who was hired as a spokesperson for the company,
chose stock over pay and is rumored to have sold a large majority of it right
before the dot-com bubble burst and has made approximately $600 million from
it.
AOL - $2,417,000,000 $77 per second
Founded all the way back in 1991 as America Online, and
rebranded as AOL in 2006, AOL is best known for it’s online software suite,
where, at it’s prime, 30 million members worldwide would access the internet
through this community. Business may be good compared to some of the other
companies on the list, but when you compare what they made in 2010, to what
they made in 2006 (when the company went through it’s rebranding), they now
make less than a third of what they did. The trouble was bloated and outdated
software, overpriced services and the fact that they were no longer keeping up
with the pace of the fast moving online world, or providing high demand
services anymore. Sure it’s making a lot of money, but we expect to see it
lower on this list next year.
NetFlix - $2,160,000,000 $68 per second
This is a relatively young company compared to some of the
others on this list, founded back in 1997, NetFlix is a subscription based,
online streaming and postal DVD rental company that is expanding across the world.
They’ve built their reputation on their business model on a flat fee
subscription, without late fees or due dates, and the ability to rent more than
one film at a time. They’ve excelled where Blockbuster have failed and that’s
evident in their respective companies revenues over the last 5 years. NetFlix
recognised what was wrong with the movie rental industry, and saw where the
future was going, and then went there with it. They’re coming to the UK very soon…
Facebook - $2,000,000,000 $63 per second
So popular, they even made a movie about it. As the youngest
company on this list so far, founded in only 2004, Facebook currently has more
than 750 million active users on it and has blown other social networks such as
Myspace and Bebo out of the water when it comes to popularity. Started by the
world’s youngest billionaire – Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook is not without it’s
problems, including considerable legal battles and rival companies. With a
pattern of social networks losing their overinflated worth and huge following,
and the recent launch of Google+, who knows what’s in store for Facebook in the
coming months.
Baidu - $1,199,000,000 $38 per second
As the largest and most popular search engine in Chine,
Baidu is responsible for 56.6% of all searchs. Think of them like a Chinese
Google, they index over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10
million multimedia files and their services range from your standard search,
maps, images and videos, to their own version of Wikipedia, games and internet
TV streaming. And they’re still growing, business in 2010 was almost double
what it was in 2009, making them a very safe bet when it come to investment.
Overstock - $1,100,000,000 $35 per second
2010 was a good year for Overstock, it was their first billion
dollar one and their most successful year yet. Their business model, as their
name would suggest, is to sell overstocked surplus goods, as well liquidating
the inventories of failed companies and selling their goods at below wholesale
prices. Overstock has branched out though, they also offer a small online
auction side to the website and sell hand made products from workers in
developing nations. Their accolades include being voted no.2 in the U.S. for best customer service and a Forbes
study found them to be one of the top 10 best places to work in America .
Overstock.com (or O.co for short) had their first annual profit in April of
2010 and things are looking up from there.
Skype - $860,000,000 $27 per second
With a total 663 million registered users in 2010, Skype is
the largest voice and video service on the internet and has recently been
bought by Microsoft for US$8.5 billion. Skype was founded back in 2003 as a
peer-to-peer network, where users can call each other for free over the
internet and make discount calls to local numbers all over the world.
Originally developed by the same guys who created Kazaa, the massive ‘Napster
like’ peer-to-peer program, Skype has consistently added new features and
changed hands twice in the last 6 years. Originally bought by eBay for $2.6
billion in 2005, there wasn’t even 100million users onboard, but they soon
started picking up when broadband speeds increased and they started rolling out
features like video calling. A couple months ago in May, Microsoft made their
deal to buy Skype, so it’s anyones guess what exciting new features we have
ahead of us.
Zynga - $850,000,000 $27 per second
Founded just 4 years ago in 2007, this website has become
shockingly successful from their social networking games such as FarmVille and
Zynga Poker with over 270 million monthly users. These browser based games are
primarily played through social networks such as Myspace and Facebook where
users can interact with their friends and see how each other are doing. They
make their money in an unusual way of limiting certain parts of the game to
users who will buy credits to do certain activities, with payments amounts even
exceeding $500. They’ve recently signed an agreement with Facebook for users to
only use Facebook credits for these purchases, and in turn Facebook will help
them to reach targets that they set. For people who don’t wish to pay for
credits, there are options of taking out offers and surveys from Zynga’s
numerous partners, which is helping them to make more money and drive more
traffic. An unusual, but wildly successful business model, that seems to have
grown very rapidly over the past 4 years.
Taobao - $774,210,000 $25 per second
Taobao is a Chinese language online retailer similar, to
Amazon or eBay, where retailers and users can sell direct to other users, with
a large majority of products sold being new. Founded 8 years ago, they had more
than 370 million registered users by the end of 2010, currently host more than
800 million product listings and are raked at number 15 overall in the Alexa
rank. Due to the different nature in the ways shopping is done in China, Taobao
have integrated an instant chat feature where buyers and sellers can talk
directly to each other to find out more information on a product, but more
importantly, barter on price. The majority of their income comes not from
commission, like Amazon and eBay, but from advertising revenue produced by
sellers trying to market a product to sell on their site.
Groupon - $760,000,000 $24 per second
Groupon, a deal-of-the-day website, launched just 3 years
ago in 2008 in just one city, is now in 150 markets in North America and 100
markets in Europe, Asia and South America with a following of more than 35
million registered users. The hugely rapid growth has had the Wall Street
Journal report that the company is on pace to make $1 billion in sales faster
than any other business, ever. The idea is simple, you sign up to a daily
newsletter for the city that you live in and you’ll receive daily deals for
stuff that you may be interested in. You find stuff for cheap, the seller makes
loads of money, and Groupon make a fat commission. They’ve come along way in a
sea of over 500 tough competitors, but only 1 has really come close, and that’s
LivingSocial, but even that hasn’t made much of a dent. There is 1 reason to be
worried though, and that’s Google, who, having failed to buy Groupon for
US$6billion, are planning to launch their own competing product called Google
Offers, and we all know what a force Google can be…
Orbitz - $757,500,000 $24 per second
Orbitz revenue is actually a little bit down in the past
couple years, but they’re still one of the most popular places to look for
travel information with 1.5 million flight searches and 1 million hotel
searches made through their website everyday. Founded in 2001, Orbitz was
established through a partnership of major airlines as a way to get in on the
action that sites like Expedia and Travelocity were having, and it’s done so
very successfully with 5 of the 6 major airlines combining to make this happen.
Yandex - $439,700,000 $14 per second
Yet another search engine has made it onto the list, this
time from the largest country in the world – Russia , where it’s the largest
search engine in the country. The majority of Yandex’s income comes from
advertising, but like all good search engines, they don’t just do your bog
standard searches. Yandex index over 10 billion pages, own a road traffic
monitoring agency which they use for their maps, offer photo sharing service
similar to Flickr and run an e-commerce payment system which is the second most
popular in Russia. When you consider that Russia has declining a population of
less than 142 million, and China has a population of over 1.3 billion, Yandex
have done very well for themselves compared to Baidu.
ClickBank - $350,000,000 $11 per second
If you’ve been blogging for much time at all, you’ll be
familiar with ClickBank; it’s an online marketplace for digital information
products. If you were to create a digital product such as an ebook for sale,
this is where you’d come to find affiliate markets in your niche who would sell
it for you. You have to give away a large commission, but the beauty of a
digital product means that once it’s been made, it doesn’t cost you any money
to reproduce so you can continue to sell it at whatever price you’d like. Voted
the no.1 affiliate network in America ,
the website has attracted over 1 million affiliate marketers, with around 10%
of them being active at any one time.
LinkedIn - $215,200,000 $7 per second
Launched back in May 2003, LinkedIn is like a business
version of Facebook with more than 100 million users in over 200 countries
across the world. With the slogan ‘Relationships Matter’, LinedIn realise the
importance of business networking in helping to build a company and so do their
users, which is why they currently get 33.9 million unique visitors a month,
surpassing Myspace in traffic. By the end of 2010, LinkedIn was valued at
$1.575 billion, and has earned a lot of respect from critics, with Silicon
Valley Insider ranking the company No.10 on its Top 100 List of most valuable
start ups at the end of 2010.
Summary
Amazon – $34,204,000,000 $1,084 per second
Google - $29,321,000,000 $929 per second
eBay - $9,156,000,000 $290 per second
Yahoo! - $6,324,000,000 $200 per second
Alibaba - $5,557,600,000 $176 per second
Expedia, Inc. - $3,348,000,000 $106 per second
Priceline – $3,072,240,000 $97 per second
AOL - $2,417,000,000 $77 per second
NetFlix - $2,160,000,000 $68 per second
Facebook - $2,000,000,000 $63 per second
Baidu - $1,199,000,000 $38 per second
Overstock - $1,100,000,000 $35 per second
Skype - $860,000,000 $27 per second
Zynga - $850,000,000 $27 per second
Taobao - $774,210,000 $25 per second
Groupon - $760,000,000 $24 per second
Orbitz - $757,500,000 $24 per second
Yandex - $439,700,000 $14 per second
ClickBank - $350,000,000 $11 per second
LinkedIn - $215,200,000 $7 per second