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From the Alexa top 20 global (http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&la...):

Yahoo - users before revenue, success

Google - users before revenue, success

YouTube - users before revenue, undecided

Microsoft - revenue before users, although their internet properties consistently lose money. Not really an internet company.

MySpace - users before revenue, success (MySpace is profitable already)

Facebook - users before revenue, undecided

Blogger - users before revenue, probably a success although google doesn't release numbers so it's hard to say how much money they make on it

Orkut - same as Blogger

RapidShare - users before revenue, success (very profitable freemium model)

Baidu - I'm not sure. I presume they follow the same path as Google did, but with an obvious example of how to succeed already in place.

QQ - users before revenue, success (virtual goods turn out to be a great way to monetize a free chat product in China)

eBay - revenue before users; they didn't make auctions free

Hi5 - users before revenue, undecided

In addition to being the biggest internet companies, these are among the most profitable. Several of the top 20 were acquired by other companies, making it difficult to judge how successful they would be independently. Several are still so new it's hard to tell. There's exactly one which took money over user growth (eBay).



Your comment makes the page scroll horizontally. It's bad Feng Shui.


Install the Stylish Firefox extension and add:

    @-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
        pre {
            white-space: pre-wrap;
        }
    }


Thanks a lot for this tip! I sense that I am going to use that extension a lot.


Not sure it's statistically significant, but very insightful overview - thank you.

One quick nitpick: I'd argue Rapidshare had a business model before users, even if it technically had users before revenue.




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