Who says that one can not make big in life, that individual must be kidding as the below list of top 100 richest internet entrepreneurs speaks for itself.
Rank | Name | Age | Worth | Website | Trivia |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Jeff Bezos | 47 | $19,100,000,000 | Amazon | Amazon(dot)com started out as an online bookstore back in 1995, which is why their logo has an arrow going from the A to the Z. After surviving the burst of the com bubble, Amazon finally went on to turn a profit in 2001 on the sale of over 1 billion dollars worth of goods. It currently has a revenue of more than $1000 a second, making Jeff Bezos one of the richest men in the world. |
2 | Mark Zuckerberg | 27 | $17,500,000,000 | Mark is the most public face of Facebook, which currently hosts over 750 million active users, with 500 million of those accessing the site daily. His personal wealth has skyrocketed in the past few years as Facebook has torn through the competition such as Myspace, and taken its place as the number 1 social network in the world. With the release of 'The Social Network' in recent years, it's hard to not know who Mark is. | |
3 | Larry Page | 38 | $16,700,000,000 | Larry co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1996 and it's since become the most visited website in the world, worth more than any other site on this list. Google's reach has extended far beyond search engines these days, which has provided Larry with the freedom to explore other interests such as green energy, while making him the 11th richest man in the United States. | |
4 | Sergey Brin | 38 | $16,700,000,000 | Sergey emigrated from Russia when he was just 6 years old, and it's fair to say that he's done pretty well for himself since then. Since co-founding Google with Larry Page in a garage, Sergey has gone on to be one of the richest and most successful internet entrepreneurs in the world. | |
5 | Robin Li | 42 | $9,400,000,000 | Baidu | Robin co-founded Baidu, which is China's most popular search engine, and has always been quite special. He was born to poor factory worker parents with 4 sisters, but always excelled in education, earning a Master of Science degree in 1994 before go on to found Baidu in 2000. |
6 | Eric Schmidt | 56 | $7,000,000,000 | Schmidt landed the job of CEO at Google in 2001, with a $250,000 salary, and stock options. Schmidt is actually one of only a very few number of people who became a billionaire through the stock options received as an employee to a company of which he has no relation to the founders. He's now the 136th richest person in the world. Not bad. | |
7 | Pierre Omidyar | 44 | $6,200,000,000 | eBay | Pierre launched eBay in 1995 after writing the code that the site is based on, during a long holiday weekend. The rest, as they say, is history. He's now also a well known philanthropist with his own network that's committed over $290 million to different companies and organizations. |
8 | Hiroshi Mikitani | 46 | $5,600,000,000 | Rakuten | Hiroshi is the CEO of Rakuten, which is the largest online shopping mall in Japan with over 72 million users. The site has grown recently by branching out, buying other e-commerce sites such as buycom, priceminister and playcom, all in an effort to increase its global competitiveness. |
9 | Andrew Mason | 30 | $4,750,000,000 | Groupon | Andrew actually has a degree in music, but chose to go into web design, where he would meet his first investor, which eventually led to Groupon. Founded in November 2008, the site has experienced rapid growth, and huge revenues from taking 50% of every sale made through the site. There have been plenty of imitators since, but Groupon still remains on top, even turning down a $6 billion dollar acquisition bid from Google at the end of 2010. |
10 | Ma Huateng | 39 | $4,300,000,000 | Tencent | Huateng is the founder of Tencent, which started out as China's answer to AOL. Their services offer a wide variety of virtual products, from online games to instant messaging and social networking. This has made Ma Huateng one of Time's most powerful people in China. |
11 | Xavier Niel | 43 | $3,700,000,000 | Iliad | Xavier founded France's first internet provider, WorldNet in 1993, and sold it for $50 million just before the dot com bubble burst. Three years later he launched Iliad, which went public in 2004; it's a Freebox service, which bundles internet, phone and TV via ADSL. Niel now holds over 62% of the company. |
12 | Dustin Moskovitz | 27 | $3,500,000,000 | Dustin is just 8 days younger than Mark Zuckerberg, making him the youngest billionaire in the world. Dustin founded the site with Mark back at Harvard and holds on to a 6% stake of the company, which has made him incredibly rich, in fact, in the past year alone, Forbes has estimated his worth to have more than doubled. He left Facebook in 2008 to work on his own ventures, such as a mobile photo-sharing site. | |
13 | Ron Burkle | 58 | $3,200,000,000 | Yahoo! | Ron Burkle was at the head of the board of directors for Yahoo! for nine years, and as well has his internet ventures, he also has investments in supermarkets, sports teams and even clothing lines. |
14 | Neal Shenoy | 33 | $2,800,000,000 | 212MEDIA | Neal helped to launch [212]MEDIA and manage its portfolio companies across children's publishing, online gaming and social networking. He has developed business development and marketing relationships with major media companies including Amazon, MTV, Rogers. Digital and Time Inc. |
15 | Jeffrey Skoll | 46 | $2,700,000,000 | eBay | Jeffrey was eBay's first employee and president in 1996 where he wrote the business plan that eBay followed from its emergence as a start-up to the great success it is today. He cashed out a large amount of his stock, netting him $2 billion. |
16 | Mark Cuban | 53 | $2,300,000,000 | Broadcastcom | Mark is a serial entrepreneur who started the audio and video portal Broadcastcom with college pal Todd Wagner, which he eventually sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion 1999. He also owns the Dallas Mavericks and various entertainment companies such as the cable channel HDNet, Landmark Theatres and filmmaker Magnolia Pictures. |
17 | Andreas von Bechtolsheim | 55 | $2,300,000,000 | Andreas was one of the people bright enough to get behind Google in the beginning, with an initial investment of $100,000 which is now worth $2 billion. He also co-founded various tech companies such as Sun Microsystems and Kealia, which have added to his fortune. | |
18 | Yoshikazu Tanaka | 34 | $2,200,000,000 | Gree | Tanaka is the founder of Gree, which is Japan's largest social networking website. The site started in 2004, but has diversified recently into mobile gaming to better compete with rivals. He's not finished just yet though as he's been working on global expansion with working with Tencent, the largest Internet service portal in China. |
19 | Terry Jones | 54 | $2,200,000,000 | Travelocity | Terry started his career as a travel agent, before creating a website that would later help to destroy the industry in which he started in. It's currently the second largest online travel agency, and in addition to the site, they also own other travel related sites around the world, such as lastminutecom and Allhotels. |
20 | Sean Parker | 31 | $2,100,000,000 | Sean is well known across the internet for his various online ventures, such as his part in Napster and Facebook, the latter of which made him the majority of the money he has today. He has since invested $15 million in Spotify which rivals Napster, and he says is the answer to piracy. | |
21 | Mark Pincus | 45 | $2,000,000,000 | Zynga | Mark is the reason we all get annoying invites to games such as FarmVille on Facebook. He owns Zynga, which was founded in 2007 and he is currently serving as the CEO. There are currently over 265 million monthly active users, across a network of games, which makes them one of the largest social gaming networks on the internet. |
22 | Eduardo Saverin | 29 | $2,000,000,000 | Eduardo Saverin is yet another person who got rich through Facebook, with a 5% stake in the company that he got when he went to Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg. If you've seen The Social Network, you'll know that their relationship went sour, but it still didn't hold Eduardo back from becoming a very rich man. | |
23 | Jung-Ju Kim | 43 | $2,000,000,000 | Nexon | Jung-Ju Kim was somewhat of a pioneer in online gaming, by creating the world's very first online game, way back in 1994. He now owns Korea's biggest games producer with an anual revenue of around $900 million. |
24 | Zhang Zhidong | 39 | $2,000,000,000 | Tencent | Zhang is the co-founder of Tencent, which is China's largest Internet company that provides users with "one-stop online lifestyle services". They have their hands in most pies, from online gaming to social networking, and is one of the top 3 most powerful websites in China. |
25 | Marc Benioff | 46 | $1,900,000,000 | Salesforcecom | Marc started Salesforce in his apartment in 1999 and has completely turned the software industry on its head. Salesforcecom is a service that distributes business software on a subscription basis, removing the need for purchase, while offering the products from the 'cloud'. It's an original idea and one that has proven to be very lucrative. |
26 | Isai Scheinberg | 65 | $2,000,000,000 | PokerStars | Forbes Magazine reported that PokerStars earns roughly $500 million annually in profit, from just $1.4 billion in revenue, which is a huge amount of money for a single gaming site to make. Isai started off working for IBM before moving to work on the site which went live in September of 2001. It'e believed that Isai and his family own roughly 75% of the company, which employs over 1,000 people across the world. |
27 | Shi Yuzhu | 48 | $1,830,000,000 | Giant Interactive | Shi Yuzhu is the chairman of the board and CEO at Giant Interactive, which is China's most successful online gaming website. The company offers a range of online multiplayers, some of which are free, and some are pay to play. Shi has had his ups and downs, but the company is continuing to grow and make more money every quarter. |
28 | David Cheriton | 59 | $1,800,000,000 | David Cheriton was the second person to invest in Google, matching Bechtolsheim's investment, securing his place in one of the largest internet companies in the world. Of course Cheriton has done a lot more than invest in Google, but it's that investment that has put him on this list. | |
29 | Mike Morhaime | 45 | $1,800,000,000 | Blizzard | Mike is on my list of people who changed the internet, because he not only created a game which was insanely popular, but he convinced over 10 million people to pay a monthly subscription to play it. With that many subscription fees coming in every month, and a fee to buy the game, it's no wonder he's now worth so much money. |
30 | Kavitark Ram Shriram | 55 | $1,600,000,000 | How many of us wish we had the opportunity, money, and foresight to be able to invest in Google in the beginning? All of us probably, because Kavitark is now the third early investor in this list. Of course, there are many more strings to his bow, but this is what has made him the most money. | |
31 | Jack Ma | 46 | $1,600,000,000 | Alibaba | Jack saw a gap in the market, and it's made his site one of the top 3 sites in China, along with Baidu and Tencent. Alibaba offers a way for companies outside of China to find manufacturers and suppliers inside China. |
32 | William Ding | 39 | $1,600,000,000 | NetEase, Blizzard | Ding's company NetEase partnered with Blizzard to produce the latest sequel to Blizzard's World of Warcraft series in China. His company is so successful, that he was actually the richest man in China at one point. |
33 | Victor Koo | 44 | $1,500,000,000 | Youku | Victor founded Youku in 2005, which is a mix between Hulu and Youtube, where visitors can watch a range of online videos. He was very well educated at Stanford and Berkeley in America, and his site is currently worth more than the ailing AOL, with a value estimated at $3.3 billion. |
34 | Reid Hoffman | 44 | $1,500,000,000 | Reid founded LinkedIn in 2002 after he finished working at PayPal, and it was one of the first business orientated social networks. He was the CEO for the first 4 years, and is now the Chairman and the President. Reid is also a pretty savvy investor, with stakes in Facebook and Zynga, both of which are top 25 companies, as well as other sites such as Flickr, Digg and Last.fm. | |
35 | Peter Thiel | 43 | $1,500,000,000 | PayPal, Facebook | Peter is most famous for co-founding PayPal in early 2002, and sold it to eBay later that year for $1.5billion. Not bad for a year's work. This netted him roughly $55million for his small stake in the company. If you've seen 'The Social Network', you may have seen an actor playing Thiel, making an angel investment into Facebook for 10.2% of the company, which only cost him $500,000. This is where he's made the majority of his money, but he is also a serial investor, with stakes in numerous companies. |
36 | Bob Parsons | 60 | $1,500,000,000 | GoDaddy | Bob Parsons is responsible for GoDaddy, which is currently the world's largest web hosting provider with more than 5 million active accounts and almost 50 million domain names under its belt. Winner of the Purple Heart in Veitnam, he went on to get a business degree and started his own company, which he later sold for $64million to help fund GoDaddy. |
37 | Eric Lefkofsky | 42 | $1,500,000,000 | Groupon | Eric is one of 2011's new billionaires and founder of the rapidly growing website Groupon, so fast in fact, that Forbes reckons it's the fastest growing company in history. They turned down an offer to buy Groupon from Google in December of 2010, for $6billion, and by the time April 2011 came around, it was valued at between $15-20 billion. |
38 | Steve Case | 53 | $1,300,000,000 | AOL | Almost everyone in America will be familiar with AOL (America Online), which was founded way back in 1991. They're currently making less than a third of what they did in 2006, but when you look at the life of the company, a lot of money has been made in the past, making Steve a very rich man. |
39 | Meg Whitman | 55 | $1,300,000,000 | eBay | Meg is currently the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but before then she was the CEO of eBay for 10 years until 2008. In her time at eBay, she oversaw the expansion from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. She is the most successful woman on this list. |
40 | Janus Friis | 35 | $1,300,000,000 | Skype, Kazaa | Janus is probably best known for co-founding the peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa, and the peer-to-peer network Skype. He maintained ownership interest of Skype even after its sale to eBay in 2005 for $2.6billion, and made even more money when it was later sold to Microsoft for $8.5billion. |
41 | Niklas Zennstrom | 45 | $1,300,000,000 | Skype, Kazaa | Niklas is probably best known for co-founding the peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa, and the peer-to-peer network Skype. He maintained ownership interest of Skype even after its sale to eBay in 2005 for $2.6billion, and made even more money when it was later sold to Microsoft for $8.5billion. |
42 | Todd Wagner | 51 | $1,200,000,000 | Broadcastcom | Todd founded what was to become Broadcastcom back in 1995 from an old Packard Bell, in a partnership with Mark Cuban. The site grew and grew and in 1999, Wagner and Cuban sold Broadcastcom to Yahoo! for $5.7 billion, making 300 employees millionaires and Wagner and Cuban instant billionaires. They're the sort of bosses I'd like to have. |
43 | Chen Tianqiao | 38 | $1,200,000,000 | Shanda Interactive | Chen formed Shanda Interactive in 1999, which is an online gaming service that also produces and distributes movies. The company is one of the industry leaders, and has made Chen a Billionaire in 2010. There are currently 140 million users in the Shanda Interactive network. |
44 | Jerry Yang | 42 | $1,100,000,000 | Yahoo! | Jerry co-founded Yahoo! with David Filo, in 1994, and although it's nowhere near as powerful as Google, it's still an incredibly successful website, with over 500 million visitors a month. David is currently the 879th richest person in the world, and a well known philanthropist, putting he riches to good use. |
45 | David Filo | 45 | $1,100,000,000 | Yahoo! | David co-founded Yahoo! with Jerry Yang, in 1994, and although it's nowhere near as powerful as Google, it's still an incredibly successful website, with over 500 million visitors a month. David is currently the 879th richest person in the world, and a well known philanthropist, putting he riches to good use. |
46 | David Litman | 53 | $1,000,000,000 | Hotelscom | David co-founded hotelscom with Bob Diener as a toll-free telephone service, offering consumers a one-stop source for discounted hotel rooms in major cities. The site is now a part of the Expedia network. |
47 | Omid Kordestani | 48 | $900,000,000 | Omid worked as Google's senior vice president of worldwide sales and field operations, for 10 years, until April 16, 2009. His business and relations skills have earned him a lot of money and proved himself to an incredible asset to the companies he's worked for, building relationships between some of the biggest companies in the world. | |
48 | Tom Anderson | 40 | $845,000,000 | MySpace | Tom co-founded Myspace in 2003 and between 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 it even surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. Tom sold Myspace in to News Corp in July 2005 for $580 million, and he's certainly got out at the right time, as it was recently sold for just $35 million. |
49 | Nick Swinmurn | 37 | $840,000,000 | Zappos | Nick founded this online shoe store when he couldn't find the pair of brown shoes he was looking for at the mall. This was back in 1999, when he founded the site and it has since grown be the largest online shoe store. The site was recently bought by Amazon in an all stock deal for $1.2 billion. |
50 | Eileen Gittins | 54 | $825,600,000 | Blurb | Eileen saw a gap in the market when she needed to get 40 copies of a book printed, and found that there wasn't really who could do that for cheap. That's how she got the idea for Blurb, a site where you can design your own book and get as many or few copies printed as you like. The site had received a huge amount of recognition from companies such as Time Magazine and the Webby Awards, and it's continuing to grow today. |
51 | Simon Nixon | 44 | $700,000,000 | MoneySupermarket | Simon founded MoneySupermarket, a British price comparison site, in 1993. It allows users to compare prices on a range of products, including mortgages, credit cards and loans. It's done so well that Simon was able to buy his business partner's 47% stake in the company for £162m in June of 2007. The site is even listed on the London Stock Exchange, making it the largest internet initial public offering in Europe. |
52 | Marc Andreessen | 40 | $700,000,000 | Netscape | Marc was the co-founder of one of the very first internet browsers - the Netscape Navigator. The company continued to grow in a big way, and was acquired by AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999. Netscape is a now non existant browser and was put to an end by AOL in 2008, which probably turned out to be another, not so wise purchase of AOL. |
53 | Elon Musk | 40 | $672,000,000 | PayPal | Musk has a lot of stings to his bow; not only is he credited for part of the creation of PayPal, but he is also known for having created the first viable production electric car , theTesla Roadster, and for designing a private successor to the Space Shuttle. |
54 | Drew Houston | 28 | $600,000,000 | DropBox | Drew is just 28 years old and the founder of Dropbox, an online storage and backup system, back in 2008. By december of 2010, Dropbox holds 10.41% of the worldwide Backup Client market, based on the number of installations that the client has recieved. Drew has held off from selling to massive companies, such Apple, in the hopes that service will continue to grow at the rate it currently is. I know I have no plans to stop using it, it's great. |
55 | Michael Birch | 41 | $595,000,000 | Bebo | Bebo was founded by Michael and his wife in 2005, and was bought 3 years later by AOL for $850 million, which gave Michael and his wife $595 million for their 70% stake. In April 2010, AOL announced it was planning to sell or shut down Bebo, eventually deciding to sell for less than $10 million. The Birch's clearly made the right decision in selling when they did. |
56 | Eric Baker | 50 | $558,000,000 | StubHub, Viagogo | Eric took StubHub from conception, to a rapidly growing, profitable business that completely changed the way that fans buy tickets. It was another site on this list that was acquired by eBay for $307M. He now runs Viagogo, which is an online ticket exchange that allows people to buy and sell live event tickets in a safe and secure environment free from fraud and touts. |
57 | Frank Schilling | 41 | $500,000,000 | Domainer | Frank started in on the domain investing niche much later than most, in 2000. He's a domainer, which means that he invests in high-value generic domain names for the purpose of future development and sale. His portfolio has grown very quickly and strongly and it's now reckon to be worth between $500 million and a billion dollars. |
58 | Chris Hughes | 27 | $500,000,000 | Chris Hughes is the forth roommate to Mark, Eduardo and Dustin, when they were back in college, and that was how he got involved with Facebook. As well as a co-founder of Facebook, Chris was also in charge of the social media side of Barack Obama's presidency campaign. | |
59 | Zhang Chaoyang | 46 | $435,000,000 | Sohu | Zhang founded Sohu, which is a search engine and online multiplayer gaming resource, soon after leaving MIT in 1995. The site soon became a household name and has survived many ups and downs, including the burst of the dot com bubble, which saw the stock price drop to less than $1 a share. Sohu now has a share price of a little over $60. |
60 | Tony Hsieh | 37 | $400,000,000 | Link Exchange, Zappos | Prior to Zappos, Tony founded LinkExchange, which is an internet advertising network, which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million. He used some of that money to invest in Zappos very early on, though his investment firm 'Venture Frogs'. Wise investments like this, along with the sale of Zappos to Amazon, has put Tony on this list alone. |
61 | Chad Hurley | 34 | $335,000,000 | YouTube | Chad Hurley co-founded YouTube with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, after they received bonuses from PayPal when it was bought by eBay. They used this money, plus some investments to form an office, and start Youtube. They sold the website to Google less than 2 years after it was founded, for $1.65 billion. |
62 | Jack Dorsey | 35 | $330,000,000 | Twitter launched in July of 2006, which grew rapidly to 200 million users by 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. The idea was simple, and addictive, which is exactly why it works. Jack is who we have to thank for the extra form of social media that we have to market with. | |
63 | Steve Chen | 33 | $300,000,000 | YouTube | Steve Chine was one of the founders to a website that surely changed the way we use the internet - YouTube. The website became such an internet phenomenon (that's managed to last), It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. |
64 | Gurbaksh Singh Chahal | 27 | $300,000,000 | gwalletcom | Chahal is a pretty incredible man; by the time he was 25 he had founded and sold two advertising companies for a total of $340 million. He's doing remarkably well for someone so young, and has already founded his third advertising agency, which was valued in March 2011 at $200 million. |
65 | Stephen Kaufer | 43 | $260,000,000 | TripAdvisor | Stephen Kaufer founded TripAdvisor in 2000, and it has since gone on to acquire 19 leading travel brands, and has expanded the TripAdvisor brand into 30 countries around the world. Much like Hotelscom, TripAdvisor is now a part of Expedia, Inc. |
66 | Matt Mullenweg | 27 | $250,000,000 | Wordpress | Matt founded WordPress, which is the most popular blogging platform on the internet, and used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet’s “top 1 million” websites and as of August 2011 powers 22% of all new websites. The company has changed the way that we use the website, with this site, and both of my own, being made on WordPress. |
67 | Scott Blum | 46 | $250,000,000 | Buycom | Buycom started out selling electrical goods online at below cost price, with the idea that they would make up the lost money in advertising and warranties. This lead to a huge amount of first year sales and allowed Scott to sell his stake in the company, just two years later, for a cool $195 million. The company was recently bought by Rakuten as part of their global expansion, for $250 million. |
68 | Andrew Gower (Paul) | 32 | $239,000,000 | Runescape | Andrew was responsible for creating RuneScape with his brother Paul. It's an MMORPG, which stands for massively multiplayer online role playing game, and it's played by approximately 10 million active accounts per month, over 156 million registered accounts. It's even recognised by Guiness World Records as the world's most popular free MMORPG. |
69 | Duncan Cameron | 39 | $210,000,000 | MoneySupermarket | Duncan Cameron founded MoneySupermarket with Simon Nixon in 1993, but decided to get out in 2007 when he sold his rather large 47% stake to Simon Nixon for £162m. |
70 | Andrew Michael | 31 | $207,000,000 | Fasthosts | Fasthosts started out as a school project for Andrew when he was 17, and it grew into multi-million dollar business. for £61.5 million, netting Michael £46 million for his 75% stake. Michael remained as CEO until 2009, when he left to found Livedrive. |
71 | Bobby Chang | 39 | $190,000,000 | Rapidshare | RapidShare is one of the world's largest file-hosting sites, with 10 petabytes of files on its servers, and handling up to three million users simultaneously. The money from the site comes from paying subscribers who use the service to share files, and pay so that the limitations on file size and waiting time are removed. |
72 | Blake Ross | 26 | $150,000,000 | Mozilla | Blake Ross is famous for his web browser, Mozilla Firefox. Blake originally started out working with AOL on the Netscape browser, but he wasn't happy with where it was being taken, so he decided to create his own. Firefox was released when Blake was 19 in 2004, and totalled 100 million downloads in just one year. |
73 | Reed Hastings | 51 | $150,000,000 | Netflix | Reed is the CEO of Netflix, and on the boards of Microsoft, Facebook, and numerous non-profit organizations. He founded Netflix in 1998, after realizing that his gym had a much better business model than his local video store. The Netflix model is based on the idea of a monthly subscription, with no late fees, and it's putting companies like Blockbuster out of business. |
74 | Peter Dubens | 44 | $135,000,000 | 365 Media, Pipex, Oakley | Peter Dubens is one of Britain's most successful entrepreneurs, and a serial investor. He bought one internet service provider and sold it to another for a large profit, and more recently, he invested in 365 media, which was sold to British Sky Broadcasting for £100m. |
75 | Phil Cronin | 46 | $131,000,000 | Tombolacom | Phil founded Tombola, which is a popular online bingo website, back in 2000. It may seem unusual to Americans that bingo is a popular game in Europe, but for some reason, it really is. The website is very popular and a great idea, with excellent profit margins. £10.9m of profit was made on sales of £22m in 2009-10 alone. |
76 | Jim Kimsey | 71 | $129,000,000 | AOL | Jim was the co-founder and first chairman of AOL, back when it was still Control Video Corporation in 1983. 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. AOL isn't quite the force it used to be anymore, but they're not out of the game yet. |
77 | Arianna Huffington | 60 | $115,000,000 | Huffington Post | Arianna is best known as the co-founder to the website named after herself - The Huffington Post. Her site was famously sold to AOL at the beginning of 2011 for $315 million. The site was founded in 2005 as an alternative news source, with writings from progressive minded columnists. |
78 | Noel Hayden | 40 | $112,000,000 | Gamesys | Noel founded Gamesys which is an online bingo program, which runs on Jackpotjoy,com, as well as many other websites. The software is actually on over 250 wesbites, including newspapers, airlines, and even the official bingo site for Ceasers Palace in Vegas. They took an idea, and instead of sticking to just one site, the spread it across many and made money from each. |
79 | Ryan Deluca | 33 | $110,000,000 | Bodybuildingcom | Ryan founded bodybuildingcom in 1999 when he was just 19. It's a site that manufactures and retails nutritional products and sport supliments. In 2008 the majority share of the website was bought out from Ryan for a rumoured $100 million. |
80 | Max Levchin | 36 | $100,000,000 | PayPal, Slide | Max is the third co-founder, along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, of PayPal. Max only owned a 3.2% which was worth $34 million at the time of the acquisition. He also founded Slide, which was a short lived social network, that was bought by Google for $182 million. |
81 | John Vechey | 30 | $100,000,000 | PopCap Games | John founded PopCap Games which is a games website, with free to play, but limited games, and larger 'pay to play' games. They're most popular game is bejewelled, a game that I've dabbled in myself in the past, due to its addictive nature. The company has also branched out into mobile phone gaming too. In July 2011, EA games announced that it would be buying PopCap for $650 million with an addition $100 million stock option. |
82 | John Paleomylites | 51 | $95,000,000 | Beatthatquotecom | Beat that quote was founded by John in 2005, and it's another British price comparison site, specialising in personal finance products. The website experienced rapid growth, even being ranked the fastest growing UK website in 2007. Beatthatquote also provide price comparison services to other websites, such as MSNcompare, and it was recently bought by Google for £37.7 million. |
83 | Angelo Sotira | 30 | $87,000,000 | DeviantArt | DeviantArt was launched by Angelo in 2000, and currently has an Alexa Rank of 129, which is extremely high for a niched website. The site is known around the world, by more than 15 million members, covering a wide range of artistic niches. It's considered to be the Facebook of the art/digital art world. |
84 | Naveen Selvadurai | 28 | $80,000,000 | Foursquare | Naveen is the founder of Foursquare, which is a location based app where users 'check in' and gain points. The joint venture is estimated to be worth something in the region of $600 million. There is obvious competition from Facebook, but Foursquare seems to have stood the test of time so far. Naveen originally had a similar product that relied on SMS messaging, rather than a mobile app, to check in, but it was bought by Google and shut down, spurring the launch of Foursquare. |
85 | Daniel Ek | 27 | $80,000,000 | Spotify | Daniel co-founded the popular music streaming program 'Spotify'. The income for the programs come from ads that are played on the free version and monthly subscriptions from the paid version. It's changing the way we listen to, and find new music, and has gone from strength to strength, with Sean Parker recently making an investment and taking it to the US. |
86 | Gina Bianchini | 39 | $78,000,000 | Ning | Gina founded Ning, an online platform which allows people and organizations to create custom social networks, with Marc Andreessen in 2004. As of June 2011, there are 90,000 social networks, which are running as part Ning platform. The service even allows users to monetize their networks with the use of Google AdSense. With so many social networks running on the platform, it's no surprise that there is currently 65 million monthly unique visitors globally on Ning. |
87 | Mark C. Vadon | 39 | $73,000,000 | Blue Nile | Blue Nile was founded in 1999 and today is the largest online retailer of certified diamonds, with a revenue of $333 million in 2010. The site is a supplier of ethically sourced diamonds and endorses a zero-tolerance policy towards conflict diamonds. Mark has been the Chairman of the Board since the site was founded over 10 years ago. |
88 | Jawed Karim | 32 | $64,000,000 | YouTube | Jawed worked at PayPal with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, before the idea of YouTube came along, where he then went on to co-found the company and developed the YouTube concept and website. When YouTube was acquired by Google, Karim received 137,443 shares of stock, worth about $64 million based on Google's closing stock price at the time. |
89 | Pavel Durov | 25 | $60,000,000 | V Kontakte | Pavel Durov founded V Kontakte in 2007, which is a social network in eastern Europe, which is very similar in design to Facebook, so much so, that it's been considered a clone. There are about 135 million accounts, and it currently ranks 46 in the Alexa rank. As well as many of the Facebook features, there's also a torrent file sharing system incorporated into it. |
90 | Alexander Levin | 26 | $56,000,000 | Image Shack | Alexander founded Image Shack, which is a free to use image hosting website. There are options to pay for a subscription service, but the majority of its revenue is produced from advertising related to its free image hosting. With an Alexa rank of 135, and the launch of yfrog, which is a Twitter version of the site, Image Shack is clearly a very successful website, which is taking steps to ensure that it's here to stay. |
91 | Jake Nickell | 28 | $50,000,000 | Threadless | Jake is the founder of Threadless, which he started with $1,000 in seed money after entering an Internet t-shirt design contest. That was back in 2000, and since then, he's created an online network where users vote on designs to get printed, where the best ones go into production, and the designer gets a fee. They've expanded internationally with their famous low rate shipping. |
92 | Chris DeWolfe | 45 | $50,000,000 | MySpace | Chris was the 6th person to ever have an Myspace account, and the former CEO and co-founder. The story of Myspace is known by most people, and it's no surprise that he's no longer working as CEO as lot of the staff who were there in the beginning, left because they didn't like the direction the website was going in. |
93 | Angie Hicks | 41 | $50,000,000 | Angieslist | Angieslist is a consumer review website that has about 1.5 million subscribers throughout the United States and Canada who post an average of about 40,000 reviews each month. The site was one of the first of its kind, launching all the way back in 1995. The website expanded early, reaching new cities, and it's now has an estimated revenue of $58 million last year. |
94 | Sean Belnick | 23 | $42,000,000 | BizChair | BizChaircom is an online retailer of office chairs and furniture, as well as restaurant, church, furniture, furniture, and medical furniture. They were one of the first online only furniture retailers when they were founded by Sean Belnick back in 2001. Their sales have risen steadily over the last five years to over $58 million in 2010. It started in a bedroom with a $500 investment and has grown into one of the largest furniture retailers on the internet. |
95 | Simon Perrée | 40 | $40,000,000 | Playcom | Along with Richard Goulding, Simon Perrée founded Playcom, which currently has roughly 7,000,000 registered customers, a catalogue of over 8,000,000 products, and employs some 500 staff. One of the reasons for its success with United Kingdom customers is that they can import items costing £18 and under without paying tax, because they're based on the Island of Jersey - that's why you can buy 10 dvds and they all come individually packaged. The site was recently sold to Rakuten for £25 million. |
96 | Richard Goulding | 41 | $40,000,000 | Play(dot)com | Along with Simon Perrée, Richard Goulding founded Playcom, which currently has roughly 7,000,000 registered customers, a catalogue of over 8,000,000 products, and employs some 500 staff. One of the reasons for its success with United Kingdom customers is that they can import items costing £18 and under without paying tax, because they're based on the Island of Jersey - that's why you can buy 10 dvds and they all come individually packaged. The site was recently sold to Rakuten for £25 million. |
97 | David Karp | 24 | $40,000,000 | Tumblr | David Karp brought blogging to the younger generation with Tumblr, which is a very easy to set up blogging platform, that's available for free. The site only launched 3 years ago in 2007, but it's already surpassed the number of Wordpress blogs, with over 30 million users. It's even the blogging platform for President Obama's official blog. |
98 | Andrew Fox | 39 | $40,000,000 | Track Entertainment | Track Entertainment is an entertainment and media company that connects brands and consumers through events, television, digital media, and lifestyle marketing. It owns several Web sites including lifestyle site Clubplanetcom, and ticketing solution Wanticketscom, and various other websites. |
99 | Garrett Camp | 29 | $30,000,000 | StumbleUpon | Garrett Camp created StumbleUpon, a site that had probably provided most websites some traffic in the past, I know that mine certainly does well from it. You input your interest and SU takes you on a trip around the internet to relevant links. The site has an Alexa rank of 115, which just goes to show how popular it is. |
100 | Halsey Minor | 47 | $30,000,000 | CNET | Halsey Minor has certainly had his ups and downs in recent years, after selling what was one of the first profitable websites, CNET, Minor has had a string a legal, and tax problems, as well as business difficulties with his new hotel chain. He was estimated to be worth $354 million back in 1999, but now he's worth about a tenth of that. |
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