Find out how many employees Amazon have, which sites Google has bought, who’s the most profitable and much more!
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 is 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 four 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.
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