Let's Talk Big Business

The U.S.'s Biggest Internet Companies for 2010

The U.S. hosts more internet companies and general websites than in any other country. As of Alexa's latest ranking of worldwide websites just earlier today, staple sites like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and Twitter command spots in the top ten websites (respective of monthly traffic)*. Put it in perspective: the former internet companies are not only immensely popular and hugely profitable, they claim home to the prestigious top ten of the internet. That is out of hundreds-of-millions of websites, by the way. Enough perspective? Let's take a look at four of the internet's largest successes.

Google: This one is nothing short of a global phenomenon. Google hit the ground running back in 1998 in Menlo Park, CA. At the helm were Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. Little did they know that their small start-up would become a behemoth internet company that would eventually trump even the likes of giants like Yahoo! and Microsoft.com. The two entrepreneurs are still executives at Google, but its acting CEO is Eric Schmidt.

Today, Google commands well over 60% of the search engine traffic worldwide, according to comScore.com*. Its chief competitors are the Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! company and to a lesser extent, Microsoft's recently developed Bing service. The company's "Google Ads", also known as Ad sense, is one of the company's core means of obtaining massive profits and developing a gargantuan list of useful [mostly free] applications--such as Gmail and Google Earth. But all of those are just words, right? Here are the statistics: Google servers perform a staggering, unfathomable 88 billion searches a month. That's over four times the amount of searches the internet giant Twitter does, and over nine times that of Yahoo! To top it all off---Google surpassed over 26 billion in revenues for 2009, with an unimaginable 7+ billion in pure profit.

It wouldn't seem right not to immediately follow-up the last paragraph with Google's chief internet foe, Yahoo!. Yahoo! was incorporated as an internet business in 1995 under two entrepreneurs/technological innovators: David Filo and Jerry Yang. Through the mid-to-late 90's, it was the predominant search engine; but around 2002, Google was starting to beat Yahoo! at its own game. Compare Yahoo!'s 9 billion searches a month to Google's 88 billion and Yahoo!'s "meager" profit of 597 million to Google's 7 billion* and, well, you get the picture. However, Yahoo does still see traffic that's only second to Google and Twitter's and is still has a very viable internet presence (i.e. thanks in part to Microsoft's ongoing support and fervent desire to acquire it).

Facebook is undoubtedly the social networking site that truly could. These days, there's nary an instance when you do not stumble upon (StumbleUpon is another social networking giant, by the way) one of those familiar Facebook icons that wants you to "Like This" or "Join Our Facebook". Originally started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg as a social network exclusively for college students, Facebook now proudly hosts over 310 million individuals' profiles. It's difficult, however, to state figures like its income (since Facebook is a private company and not required to disclose financial records to the public), but most analysts peg its 2009 total revenue just short of 900 million dollars*. Facebook garners the lion's share of its capital from ads. Zuckerberg himself, in a recent interview, essentially confirmed that his company would top one billion in 2010*.

Youtube, a subsidiary of Google, is yet another internet mogul. It hosts hundreds of millions of user-uploaded videos. And like the aforementioned companies, its core source of revenues comes from sponsors by way of ads (and most likely, the insanely rich Google parent itself). The San Bruno-based corporation, founded by a group of ex-PayPal workers, has an Alexa rank of 3--being surpassed only by its parent company and Facebook in terms of monthly traffic. Furthermore, it's expected that Youtube--for the first time since its inception--will reach the one billion dollar summit in revenues*: something every business wishes for, but very few will ever see*.

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The U.S.'s Biggest Internet Companies for 2010 The U.S. hosts more internet companies and general websites than in any other country. As of Alexa's latest ranking of worldwide websites just earlier today, staple sites like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Windows Live, and Twitter command spots in the top ten websites (respective of monthly traffic). Put it in perspective: the former internet companies are not only immensely popular and hugely profitable, they claim home to the prestigious top ten of the internet. That is out of hundreds-of-millions of websites, by the way. Enough perspective? Let's take a look at four of the internet's largest successes. Google: This one is nothing short of a global phenomenon. Google hit the ground running back in 1998 in Menlo Park, CA. At the helm were Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. Little did they know that their small start-up would become a behemoth internet company that would eventually trump even the likes of giants like Yahoo! and Microsoft.com. The two entrepreneurs are still executives at Google, but its acting CEO is Eric Schmidt. Today, Google commands well over 60% of the search engine traffic worldwide, according to comScore.com. Its chief competitors are the Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! company and to a lesser extent, Microsoft's recently developed Bing service. The company's "Google Ads", also known as Ad sense, is one of the company's core means of obtaining massive profits and developing a gargantuan list of useful [mostly free] applications--such as Gmail and Google Earth. But all of those are just words, right? Here are the statistics: Google servers perform a staggering, unfathomable 88 billion searches a month. That's over four times the amount of searches the internet giant Twitter does, and over nine times that of Yahoo! To top it all off---Google surpassed over 26 billion in revenues for 2009, with an unimaginable 7+ billion in pure profit. It wouldn't seem right not to immediately follow-up the last paragraph with Google's chief internet foe, Yahoo!. Yahoo! was incorporated as an internet business in 1995 under two entrepreneurs/technological innovators: David Filo and Jerry Yang. Through the mid-to-late 90's, it was the predominant search engine; but around 2002, Google was starting to beat Yahoo! at its own game. Compare Yahoo!'s 9 billion searches a month to Google's 88 billion and Yahoo!'s "meager" profit of 597 million to Google's 7 billion* and, well, you get the picture. However, Yahoo does still see traffic that's only second to Google and Twitter's and is still has a very viable internet presence (i.e. thanks in part to Microsoft's ongoing support and fervent desire to acquire it). Facebook is undoubtedly the social networking site that truly could. These days, there's nary an instance when you do not stumble upon (StumbleUpon is another social networking giant, by the way) one of those familiar Facebook icons that wants you to "Like This" or "Join Our Facebook". Originally started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg as a social network exclusively for college students, Facebook now proudly hosts over 310 million individuals' profiles. It's difficult, however, to state figures like its income (since Facebook is a private company and not required to disclose financial records to the public), but most analysts peg its 2009 total revenue just short of 900 million dollars. Facebook garners the lion's share of its capital from ads. Zuckerberg himself, in a recent interview, essentially confirmed that his company would top one billion in 2010. Youtube, a subsidiary of Google, is yet another internet mogul. It hosts hundreds of millions of user-uploaded videos. And like the aforementioned companies, its core source of revenues comes from sponsors by way of ads (and most likely, the insanely rich Google parent itself). The San Bruno-based corporation, founded by a group of ex-PayPal workers, has an Alexa rank of 3--being surpassed only by its parent company and Facebook in terms of monthly traffic. Furthermore, it's expected that Youtube--for the first time since its inception--will reach the one billion dollar summit in revenues: something every business wishes for, but very few will ever see.