Some websites out there – especially those on your search history – are absolutely raking it in, in terms of revenue.
But what are these online favourites actually worth? Domain and hosting provider, Fasthosts, were curious, so dug into the world’s most popular sites and worked out the most valuable domain names by using estimations of their daily, monthly, and annual revenue. The results might just surprise you…
1. YouTube and Google
Estimated value: $102,650,332,250 (One hundred and two billion, six hundred and fifty million, three hundred and thirty-two thousands, two hundred and fifty)
Not really much of a surprise, topping the list in joint first is Google and YouTube – little surprise given they’re both owned by Alphabet.
Anyone who has ever tried to watch a video on YouTube will know instantly where the vast majority of their revenue comes from: advertising. That may be embedded adverts that interrupt your clips or sponsored videos. Given an estimated 3.7m new videos are uploaded to YouTube every single day – amounting to around 271,330 hours of content – that’s a LOT of potential revenue coming in.
Advertising also makes up the majority of revenue for Google, while another chunk comes from Google Cloud, which includes fees for infrastructure, platform, and other services such as Google Wordspace for Gmail, Drive, Docs, etc.
2. Tmall
Estimated value: $59,325,166,125 (Fifty-nine billion, three hundred and twenty-five million, one hundred and sixty-six thousand, one hundred and twenty-five)
Coming in at second place is the Chinese B2C marketplace Tmall – an offshoot of Taobao, which we’ll come onto later – worth around $59.3 billion, which is still huge considering it’s almost 50% less than our joint first place. Tmall charges its vendors to set up a store, and charges a commission on the products sold. And with around 100 million active shoppers, that’s a lot of product moving around.
3. Facebook
Estimated value: $16,000,000,000 (Sixteen million)
At number three is social media giant Facebook, and how does Facebook make its money? You guessed it: digital advertising. Due to its enormous number of users – roughly 2.11 billion of them – advertisers big and small still consider Meta a great way to reach potential customers.
4. GQ
Estimated value: $12,000,000,000 (Twelve billion)
Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ Magazine) comes in at fourth place. While we weren’t shocked to hear that advertising accounts for a great deal of its revenue, we were pleasantly surprised to hear how well GQ is leveraging social media. Working similarly to influencers, GQ partners with brands for sponsored content, and will charge for advertisers to access its ‘elite’ readers and their own social followings.
5. Baidu
Estimated value: $8,000,000,000 (Eight billion)
Chinese tech company Baidu comes in at around $8 billion in estimated value. Baidu makes its money through, you guessed it, advertising, and content subscription services – just like Netflix. They’ve also been looking into other avenues of revenue generation, such as autonomous driving and the cloud.
6. Sohu
Estimated value: $7,000,000,000 (Seven billion)
Chinese Internet company, Sohu, is valued at around $7 billion. Sohu, and its subsidiaries, make their money through advertising, a search engine service, on-line multiplayer gaming, amongst many others.
7. Taobao
Estimated value: $5,500,000,000 (Five billion five-hundred million)
Similar to Tmall, B2C Chinese marketplace Taobao is valued at more than $5 billion and in 2021 it was the eighth most visited website in the world. About 80% of Taobao’s revenue comes from charging its sellers for SEO-like advertising.
8. JD.com
Estimated value: $4,940,000,000 (Four billion nine hundred forty million)
Probably not the JD you’re thinking of. JD.com is a B2C online retailer based in China, and major competitor of Tmall. JD.com sells general merch like books, as well as electronics and home appliances through its website, which they get from distributors and manufacturers. Essentially they make a tonne of money by selling products and taking a commission.
9. Yahoo
Estimated value: $4,890,000,000 (Four billion eight hundred ninety million)
Yahoo is a search engine and directory that also offers news and mail, and comes in at ninth with an estimated value of $4,890,000,000. Digital ads is Yahoo’s main source of revenue. Advertisers buy ad-space for their products or services, and the more clicks a certain piece of ad-space garners, the more valuable it is.
10. Wikipedia.org
Estimated value: $4,830,000,000 (Four billion eight hundred thirty million)
Coming in at tenth place is Wikipedia, and everybody knows what Wikipedia does. The online encyclopaedia doesn’t offer any advertising space, so its revenue comes via donations from readers, investments, merchandise sales, and by licensing its content to other companies.
For the full study, go to: https://www.fasthosts.co.uk/domain-names/richest-domains
