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20 Websites Making The Most Money

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Three years in a row, we have looked at how much each of the top websites in the world earns on an annual basis.

This year, we put a lot more time and effort into it, to find the most up-to-date information, most people wouldn’t even know!

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

We hope you enjoy the list and please let us know what you think in the comments.

How Much Money Does Amazon, Google, and Facebook Make?

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 retailer, 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+, makes 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 recognized 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 the 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 auctions. 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 the online world goods trade.

Expedia, Inc. – $3,348,000,000 $106 per second

Founded in 1996 as a division of Microsoft, Expedia, Inc. owns 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 specializes in facilitating the sale of flights, hotels, cars, vacation, and cruises and are famous for their ‘name your own price’ system. In this system, travelers would name the price they wanted to pay, the service level they wanted, and the general location, but, the companies used, the 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 Shatner, who was hired as a spokesperson for the company, chose stock overpay 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 its 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 its 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 has failed and that’s evident in their respective companies’ revenues over the last 5 years. NetFlix recognized 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 its problems, including considerable legal battles and rival companies. With a pattern of social networks losing their overinflated worth and a 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 China, Baidu is responsible for 56.6% of all searches. 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 comes 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 site to the website and sell handmade 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 of 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 weren’t even a 100million users onboard, but they soon started picking up when broadband speeds increased and they started rolling out features like video calling. A couple of months ago in May, Microsoft made their deal to buy Skype, so it’s anyone’s 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 its 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 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 raked at number 15 overall in the Alexa rank. Due to the different nature in 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 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 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 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, which, 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 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 their website every day. 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, owns a road traffic monitoring agency which they use for their maps, offers photo sharing service similar to Flickr, and runs 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 has done very well for itself 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 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 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.

Read more: ‘Top 30 Earning Blogs’

Comments

  1. Trung Nguyen says

    Hey Josh,

    This is a detailed report with the impressive figures, calculated as I complete this comment, they also earn a hefty profit, respectively./.

  2. David Edwards says

    Smart post!, I like the break down per second!… I’ll tweet the link out…

    (@asittingduck)

    ;]

  3. Interesting list, thanks for sharing! I knew they were huge but had no idea some of these companies made the type of money they do. Amazon at over $1000 per second is unreal!

  4. Rune Ellingsen says

    Michael, you are providing very interesting metrics here. Keep it up!
    🙂

  5. Never thought that Amazon is bigger than Google!!!!

  6. Brendon Held says

    Brilliant idea to make it so granular Josh… and I presume Michael perhaps as well. I reckon this post has link bait written all over it… 😉

    Thanks guys for this great insight into these power-houses of the internet.

    B

  7. wow ! I knew these guyz made money but I didnt think it was that much.

    Thanx for the info. Great post.

  8. it’s Gonna be a Featured post in Income diary , Wonderful Post Michael! I will Tweet this……

  9. Deepak - Tuubol says

    Thanks for this informative list. Although the list contains some of the very well known publicly about having earnings in Billions and Million sof dollars, the list is refreshing. But some figures seem to be bloated. For example Amazon reported quarterly earnings of only USD 201 Million as their net income for the quarter ended March 2011.

    So, how can you claim Amazon earns in Billions of dollars. Please correct your figures and represent. Anyways nice effort.

    Thanks

    • Josh Dunlop says

      These figures are based on revenue, rather than profit, as those details are much more widely available. Thanks, Josh

  10. andreas kramers says

    Hold yer horses! $1000 a second is nuts, however I thought Alibaba was growing faster than Ebay.
    And that Baidu doubled its income is downright amazing! All in all great post. Thanx

    • Josh Dunlop says

      What I found most amazing was that Yandex index over 13 times the amount of sites that Baidu do, and make over 9 times the amount of money per person in the country, than Baidu do!

  11. Leslie Samuel says

    Wow, Amazon makes more than Google? I had no idea. I always thought that Google was the Biggest Dawg out there, lol. Very interesting list. Thanks for sharing!

  12. Diana Pemberton-Sikes says

    Fascinating reading, Michael! I remember when Jeff Bezos was on “Regis & Kathie Lee” back in 1998. After Regis asked Jeff about Amazon’s multi-million dollar loss that first year, Jeff said, “We’re not worried about making money right now. The money will come later. Right now, we’re building our brand.” Smart man, that Jeff. $1084/second. Wow! Thanks for doing the research and putting this together for us!

  13. Wow, that is some sick income man. Even to be last on this list at $7 per second is just nuts. It must have been a ton of work to get that high in income.

  14. Sadie-Michaela Harris says

    Hello Josh,

    Sadie here in France, my goodness that’s not to shabby at n’est ce pas?!

    Michael, great guest blog post from Josh 😉

    Wishing you both a super sunny weekend

  15. Onibalusi Bamidele says

    This is really great to hear!

    I didn’t know Amazon makes that much money and I also didn’t know that Google’s revenue is less than Amazon’s

  16. Sweet list!!! China owns!!! Lol

  17. Skype has never reported a profit. As the service becomes more popular, the number of people that can call each other for free increases so the outlook of their current business model is pretty poor.

    Would be interesting to see a post about most profitable websites.

  18. Almost scary to think of the amount of money these very few websites have an affect on.

  19. Hey Josh and Michael.

    It’s these types of posts that make me come back to income diary.com every week. I love these posts, such great inspiration – thanks!

  20. Very inspiring post Josh! Thanks!

  21. Jamie Hudson says

    Damn, I had no idea amazon would be on top. But like you said, which ones more profitable? Anyway, inspirational stuff…

  22. Really a Awesome Post and I was shocked to see Facebook rank and Yahoo too

  23. John Hoff says

    Hi Josh, very cool list post. It’s always nice seeing who’s doing what and just goes to show you how much money is moving around on the Internet.

    As Internet marketers we have to remember the old idea that you have to go where the money is.

  24. It would also be nice to see how they operate on the inside as well.. That’ll be Cool! 🙂

  25. nice to see clickbank squeezed onto the list, love my clickbank paychecks!

    List gave me a couple investment ideas too, thanks!

  26. Angry Birds says

    Nice post,but l dont think Google+ is a threat to Facebook.

  27. Michael Williams says

    Josh, Great info. Thanks.

  28. That is some impressive list! Groupon being so new, I was shocked to see those numbers! There has been debate as to if their service actually works in the long run.

    Amazon! The leader of the pack!! And Netflix just uped the ante on their service…

    Clickbank, that was an eye opener…

  29. Great post..I also thought Google is the King of all..

  30. Bas | Profit Tempest Review says

    wow surprising numbers, how I would love to make $1000 a second

  31. Marc Poulin says

    Those revenue figures are great but it would be interesting to see the profits, where available.

    • I agree. When I was scrolling through the list, I was thinking, “Yup, yup, yup.” Then Groupon showed up. I’d be very curious to the profits (or lack there of) of that site.

  32. Hadie Danker says

    waw, nice sharing.
    i hope so can make $1000/second
    lol

  33. so how do you get indexed on Baidu!

  34. Kent Mauresmo says

    Im surprised AOL is on that list.

    • Josh Dunlop says

      You and me both!

      • Kent Mauresmo says

        I remember a long time ago I used to go into chatrooms on AOL, and I would always get a TOS violation and they would lock out my account and I couldn’t go online.

        AOL messed up because those kids they used give TOS violations too have grown up and refuse to use AOL browers, mail, or anything else. Lol.

        So I still dont know how they are on this list. I think they are affiliated with Cable tv.

  35. Hello Josh,

    I’m of course impressed by all those figures.
    It’s a good idea to evaluate how much money they make every second.
    I tried to evaluate how much I earn myself … well, not even a cent.
    It motivates me to improve my results.

    Thank you

  36. Minecraft says

    Daaang, amazon is pimpin it! lol

  37. damn micheal you are very creative if i may say , very intresting list.

  38. Edward Roberts Jr says

    Impressive! No wonder why Google earns so much than Yahoo 🙂

  39. Awesome posts. I thought Google is dominating…..

  40. hey dude nice post, But how did you find this information?

  41. nooyawka says

    Dang, left my website off the list again. I guess that’s the price of being #21 all the time;-) We’re #21 but we try harder.

  42. It’s funny seeing Baidu and Yandex listed – those search engines that hammer our sites with their spiders… but never send any real traffic…

  43. shaishav says

    Amazon will retain the number 1 spot in the coming years as well. They are diversifying at such a fast space. Who would have though that an online retailer would be the leader in cloud computing as well?!

  44. Oli Hille says

    Great list thank you. Interesting to see who is succeding online.

    Oli Hille
    Author

  45. fazal mayar says

    wow, amazon making more then google, thats absoultely insane.

    thanks for this nice post.

  46. Dacia Stuckey says

    Thanks for giving such valuable information as usual. I’m having a “why didn’t I think of that moment.”

    I am really surprised that PayPal wasn’t included on the list. They process so many transactions for big and small businesses alike.

  47. i’m Chinese, and i think Tencent (qq.com) is more powerful and profit

  48. Two things about this list:

    1. There’s no recession online!
    2. Join the Amazon affiliate program and start taking your cut of their massive income!

    Great List guys. Well laid out as usual

    Gary

  49. I quite agree with you on this list, these sites are making a killing .

  50. Jamie @ Mister Make It Rain says

    I agree with Gary, jump on the Amazon Associates wagon now, even eBay is still a great website to partner with.

    Some great insights here, thanks for sharing!

  51. Your list is missing alots of big earners from the gambling niche, party/bwin offical 2010 number where 500m$ fulltilt revenue was rumored to be around 1b and pokerstars is probably somewhere in the range of aol and facebook.

  52. getmoneyyoungmoney says

    Wow, this is so sick! I barfing while I’m typing this. I must be doing something wrong because I’m not making money by the second!!

  53. Amazon is pioneer in this industry, very interessant article.

  54. Apple rakes in the dough

  55. STILLPHENOM . says

    i wouldn’t mind being linkdin …..

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