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 directly 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 ranked at number 15 overall in the Alexa rank. Due to the different nature of the ways shopping is done in China, Taobao has 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 commissions, 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 $1 billion in sales faster than any other business, ever. The idea is simple, you sign up for a daily newsletter for the city that you live in and you’ll receive daily deals for stuff that you may be interested in. You find stuff for cheap, the seller makes loads of money, and Groupon makes a fat commission. They’ve come a long way in a sea of over 500 tough competitors, but only 1 has come close, and that’s LivingSocial, but even that hasn’t made much of a dent. There is 1 reason to be worried though, and that’s Google, which, having failed to buy Groupon for US$ 6 billion, is planning to launch its competing product called Google Offers, and we all know what a force Google can be.
Orbitz – $757,500,000 $24 per second
Orbitz's revenue is a little bit down in the past couple of 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 its website every day. Founded in 2001, Orbitz was established through a partnership with 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, owns a road traffic monitoring agency that they use for their maps, offers photo sharing service similar to Flickr, and runs an e-commerce payment system that 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 has done very well for itself compared to Baidu.
ClickBank – $350,000,000 $11 per second
If you’ve been blogging for much time, 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 that 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’, LinkedIn realizes 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 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.
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