KC Computers

The Top 10 Most Successful Internet Entrepreneurs

Written by admin on April 6th, 2011

The internet is a major platform for people all over the world, and we are all to some extent dependent on the services it provides. From social networking sites to online shops to search engines, the internet has played host to the lucrative ventures of a number of pioneers. While most of us find the internet to be a very useful tool, some people are making big bucks from it. Here are the top 10 most successful internet entrepreneurs to date.

1. Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the brains behind the most successful search engine and website to date: Google. With their creation recognized as the most visited website in the internet, Brin ranks as the 26th richest person in the world, and his billionaire colleague Page is among the top 10 richest in the United States. Sad to think we were probably still on the Gameboy while this revolution was taking place!

2. Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook. Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg shot to fame when he launched the ubiquitous social networking site Facebook. With more than 500 million users to date, Facebook’s value is estimated to be $10 billion while Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world. Getting people connected has never been this lucrative.

3. Evan Williams – Blogger and Twitter. Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan were the brains behind Pyra Labs, a company that focuses on project management software. Williams spawned a new era of information exchange when he created “Blogger”. Since then, almost every internet user has created his or her own web blog. Twitter, Williams’ other creation, is a micro-blogging platform. Twitter gets 55 million visits per month and is estimated to be worth around $1.7 billion.

4. Craig Newmark – Craigslist. Born as Craig Alexander Newmark, this internet innovator carved his name in the internet business with his San Francisco-based website Craigslist. During its humble beginnings, the website only featured local events in San Francisco. Nonetheless, it soon exploded when merchant services, job ads and similar announcements started to feature on the site. To date, Craigslist covers around 50 countries and 570 cities.

5. Jeff Bezos – Amazon.com. Anyone trying some online shopping should look no further than Amazon.com, thanks to Jeffrey Preston Bezos. Since going live in 1994, Amazon.com has become a major online shopping destination for people all over the world. Bezos was named Person of the Year back in the 1999 issue of Time Magazine.  U.S. News & World Report also included Bezos in the list of America’s Best Leaders back in 2008.

6. Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner – Broadcast.com. Todd R. Wagner and Mark Cuban are the much-loved founders of Broadcast.com, one of the first providers of streaming live sports events online. The pair is also known for its affiliations with 2929 Entertainment, Dallas Mavericks, Chairs HDNet, and an HDTV cable network. In the year 1999, the two decided to sell their website to Yahoo priced at $5.7 billion. Wagner and Cuban become billionaires overnight.

7. Bob Parsons – Go Daddy. Bob Parsons is the founder and CEO of The Go Daddy Group, Inc., a domain name registry service. Valued at $250 million, Go Daddy establishes Parsons as one of the most successful online entrepreneurs.

8. Kevin Rose – Digg. Kevin Rose is known for his social-bookmarking website Digg. He is also one of the founders of WeFollow, Pownce and Revision 3. With an initial investment of $60,000, Digg’s worth has now climbed at $200 million.

9. Sky Dayton – EarthLink. Sky Dylan Dayton is the mastermind behind EarthLink, one of the founders of eCompanies and also the chairman of Boingo, a worldwide WiFi provider. Earthlink is now one of the biggest internet service providers in the United States with over two million subscribers. The company takes in over $1 billion annually in profits.

10. Joshua Schachter – Del.icio.us. Joshua Schachter is the creator of Del.icio.us, a bookmarking site where users can keep tabs on their favourite pages, and see what’s currently hot in cyberspace. Schachter is also the founder of geoURL, a site which connects URLs to their global locations, and one of the creators of Memepool, a show-and-tell page for hilarious internet finds. Schachter is one of the pioneers of tagging and social bookmarking functions. When Yahoo obtained Delicious, Schachter was reported to have received around $30 million.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 at 7:59 am and is filed under Internet, Top 10. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.