- GOOGLE
Influence ranking 9.8 out of 10
There’s perhaps no better example of why Google sits top of this list than a remark made by one of our sub-editors, when she was checking one of the websites in this countdown. “So, I just Googled Sex.com and then Jon Bray came over for a chat,” she said, prompting the immediate reply: “You Googled it?” Such is Google’s pre-eminence that for many people it is the internet – used as the gateway to the web even when it’s more difficult to fire up Google and search for a site than it is to simply type in the domain name. That there are hundreds of millions of searches for “Google” on Google every month should surprise nobody. Google has, of course, become more than an indispensable search engine. Gmail and Google Docs have legitimate claims to be recognised in their own right in this countdown, although we’ve included them under the Google umbrella. The Google-owned YouTube does stand alone at no. 4, only because Google bought it and it can’t be ignored. Search remains the crux of the company and its dominance is all but complete. On the desktop, it has a market share in excess of 70%, while its nearest competitor Bing barely reaches double figures; on mobiles and tablets, 95% of all searches are performed via Google (both stats recorded by NetMarketShare). The job title SEO specialist is a misnomer – they’re Google gamers. Such dominance is brutally profitable. If you happen to be a car wreck attorney in the Texan city of San Antonio, it would have cost you, on average, $670 to generate a single click to your website last year using Google AdWords, making it the most expensive keyword term, according to SEMrush. The entire top 100 terms cost in excess of $265 per click. The unit cost to Google for one of those clicks? Negligible. Those profits ($13 billion in the last quarter alone) provide Google with the kind of financial war chest that only Apple can match. Billions have been wasted on failed social networking ventures (Wave, Buzz, Google+); billions more are being ploughed into driverless cars, for no other reason than it engages Google’s near-anonymous founders and they can afford to take expensive punts.
- AMAZON
Influence ranking 8.82 out of 10Amazon’s almost careless disregard for the rules of business have secured its place as the world’s biggest online retailer. “We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability,” wrote CEO Jeff Bezos to Amazon’s shareholders in 1997. He wasn’t kidding.
Amazon’s relentless expansion has resulted in almost 20 years of losses or desperately slim profits. Only in the last financial year, with Amazon Web Services proving thunderously profitable, has the company recorded profit margins that come anywhere close to reflecting the size of a company worth $366 billion. “I think we may have hit a point where it’s going to be hard for them [Amazon] to spend enough to hide all this profitability,” noted Scot Wingo, executive chairman of ecommerce consultant ChannelAdvisor, after Amazon announced profits of $513 million last quarter, compared to a loss of $57 million a year earlier.
Of course, customers don’t care whether or not Amazon is profitable. They care that their goods are keenly priced, arrive on time and are backed by good customer service. Amazon ticks all those boxes and more. Indeed, it’s Amazon’s mission to get goods from its warehouses to customers’ doorsteps more quickly that could threaten the supermarkets next.
In the past couple of years alone, Amazon has launched one-hour deliveries to selected inner-city locations, fresh food deliveries, and Amazon Pantry – boxes of groceries that arrive at your door the next working day. That’s not to mention Amazon Dash Buttons for re-stocking toilet rolls, washing powder and other consumables at the mere press of a button, and the Amazon Alexa voice assistant that can take your shopping orders for you. If you still have shares in Tesco or Sainsbury’s, it’s time for a word with your broker.
- FACEBOOK
Influence ranking 8.39 Out Of 10Remember Friends Reunited? The site that charged $15 per year to connect with old friends, which ITV bought for a cough-inducing $350 million in 2005? At that point, it may have looked like good value, with Facebook just a one-year-old service limited to American schools and universities – with no obvious means of making money.
Things have changed a mite since then. In 2015, Facebook’s revenue hit $18 billion, while Friends Reunited finally closed its virtual doors in February 2016. The number of active monthly Facebook users grew to 1.71 billion by the end of 2015, a 15% leap from the previous year. In terms of global communities, only the 2.2 billion Christians in the world are bigger in number – and we suspect they don’t keep in touch quite as regularly.
Facebook has had a genuine impact on the world, too. It’s widely thought to have played a key role in the Arab Spring uprising that ultimately led to Hosni Mubarak resigning as president of Egypt: journalists claimed Facebook and Twitter were the primary tools for connecting and organising protestors.
Ultimately, though, Facebook can be viewed as a unifying force that reinvented the local connections we used to get from living in close communities. Photos used to be taken and left to wither in shoeboxes, but now they’re instantly shared and enjoyed by friends and family. Together with services such as Skype, it allows families spread across continents to stay in touch, which would have been impossible a decade ago. All of which almost makes up for the countless cut-and-paste motivational messages we’ve been forced to wade through in that time.
- WIKIPEDIA
Influence ranking 8.09 Out Of 10
When Wikipedia opened its virtual doors in 2001, the idea sounded like a joke – an empty encyclopaedia, reliant on the kindness of strangers to write, edit and update its articles. It’s amazing anyone had the optimism to launch it in the first place. The thinking makes more sense if you know that Wikipedia wasn’t originally intended as a standalone project. Two years previously, founder Jimmy Wales had already launched Nupedia – an encyclopaedia site written and curated by experts in the traditional way. Wikipedia was to be a “feeder” project, allowing anyone to create and expand entries, which trusted editors could then review for inclusion into the “real” encyclopedia.
A final concern is the question of reliability. In 2005, a study in the journal Nature found that Wikipedia’s millions of contributors had refined its content to a degree of accuracy almost on par with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But while minor inaccuracies quickly get picked up, outright fabrications may hang around for months without being corrected. Last year, researcher Gregory Kohs carried out an experiment in which he inserted nonsensical claims into Wikipedia – such as that pain from inflammation is caused by the body’s release of volcanic rock – and saw them hang around uncorrected for many months.
Despite its imperfections, Wikipedia is a unique resource and the web’s de facto central repository of information.
- YOUTUBE
Influence ranking 8.00 Out Of 10Before YouTube, watching a video on your computer meant downloading a huge MPEG file. Even in grainy lowres, this could take hours to arrive over a dial-up or ADSL line. Want to share it online with a friend? The only way was to send them the link so they could download it.
Today, YouTube is such an integral part of Google’s platform that it’s impossible to put a value on it. For some uploaders, it’s lucrative: Swedish YouTube star PewDiePie earned over $12m last year from advertising and sponsorship, thanks to the 48 million followers of his game commentaries. Another star is Korean singer Psy, whose 2012 hit “Gangnam Style” is still the most viewed video on the site with over 2.5 billion views.
The breadth of YouTube’s library is integral to its appeal. And, in terms of obscure material such as old TV series or crackly B-sides, it’s arguable that YouTube provides an invaluable service allowing the world to enjoy previously off-limits media.
- BBC NEWS
Influence ranking 7.45 Out Of 10
BBC Online is one of those rare truly global news sites websites that inveigles its way into our daily lives. We use it to to get a straight analysis of today’s news. Nor are its effects limited to the UK: it’s taken the ethos of the BBC World Service and spread it to the online world. For many countries, it’s the only news source that can be trusted.
Of all the global news sites, we think the BBC and The Guardian (another UK site on this list) do the best job of providing balanced and wide ranging news coverage, and for Australians there is so much locally relevant content (particularly The Guardian, since it set up local operations last year) that, apart from a quick stop at SMH or The Age (effectively the same site), it’s possible to stay on top of world events without venturing much further afield.
- EBAY (Incorporating PayPal)
Influence ranking 7.21 Out Of 10
eBay took many years to shake-off its reputation as an iffy online car boot sale. Now the stories of eBay fraud are limited to a low murmur, with the auction site finally winning the mainstream respectability it always craved: it is, according to Fortune, the fifth most admired company in the internet services and retailing sector.
eBay deserves credit for its parenting of PayPal. Bought for $1.5 billion in 2002, eBay turned PayPal into the site’s payments provider – an unpopular decision at the time, but one that has borne fruit. PayPal was again spun-off as a separate business last year, earning a valuation of $46.6 billion – more than 30 times the price eBay paid. eBay behaves like users of its site – buying firms before selling them on for profit. It paid $2.5 billion for Skype in 2005. It failed to get users to communicate by phone but still managed to sell 70% of Skype to a consortium for $1.9 billion; when Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for the service in 2011.
- TWITTER
Influence ranking 6.84 Out Of 10
Like many of our top sites, Twitter at first seemed like a rather dubious idea – a blogging site where each post had to be shorter than a single text message. But the enforced brevity freed us from spending time and effort drafting updates. As founders Dom Sagolla and Jack Dorsey put it, the idea was that tweeting should be “so simple that you don’t even think about it”. Breezy, throwaway tweets rapidly became a hugely popular way to stay in touch with friends and colleagues.
Back when Twitter launched in 2006, it wasn’t only the posts that were simple, but the platform itself. At launch, there were no such things as hashtags – even replies weren’t immediately implemented. And if you wanted to “retweet” a post, you had to copy and paste it into your timeline.
With more than 500 million tweets sent each day by more than half a billion users, Twitter is a cultural phenomenon. However, the worry is that its popularity has plateaued. Company revenue has fallen short of expectations this year, and lately, shares have dropped as low as $14, from a high of $69 in 2014. Recently, the company has tried to get casual users more invested, with updates such as shuffling the order of tweets to put more interesting posts first on the feed and adding live video-streaming capabilities.
Even so, some financial analysts see Twitter’s most likely fate as a corporate buyout. The question is which tech giant will end up acquiring the service – and how cheaply the management will have to sell.
- WORDPRESS
Influence ranking 5.56 Out Of 10
WordPress can mean many things: it’s a blogging website (wordpress.com) that also hosts blogging software, which you can run in your own web space. And it’s also the name of that software itself. Confused? You might be, especially since the WordPress CMS underpins not only conventional blogging sites, but business websites and ecommerce portals, too. The platform’s publisher, Automattic, boasts that WordPress powers more than 70 million sites, which according to some estimates represents around a quarter of the entire web.
The security-minded among you may get a sense of unease about all this. When a platform has such a huge footprint, it becomes a target for hackers. The risk isn’t as widespread as it may seem: around half of all WordPress sites are hosted on the official site, so you can trust that patches and security updates will be applied.
But the other half are running on personal or company servers. Simple mistakes, such as using the default “admin” username, can allow intruders to access your site and expose you to attacks. Hackers might use your WordPress site to host a phishing gateway – or to access other resources on the same server.
It shouldn’t scare you away from WordPress, though: it’s an open-source project with a huge community of developers.
- NETFLIX
Influence ranking 5.39 Out Of 10
It’s by no means an overstatement to suggest Netflix has transformed the way we consume television. Yes, you could binge-watch a boxset on DVD, but that was for series that had been broadcast on television channels. Netflix has viewers primed to stay up all night when new series of shows such as House of Cards, Narcos or Orange Is The New Black arrive – and nobody dares talk about them on Twitter for fear of spoilers. Netflix has killed the watercooler conversation about what you watched last night.
Note that all the shows mentioned above are Netflix originals – shows that were commissioned, funded and first broadcast by Netflix itself. Netflix has raised the bar for television drama: of the top 50 highest-rated TV series on IMDb, Netflix is responsible for four of them (Stranger Things, House of Cards, Narcos, Making a Murderer). Number three on IMDb, Breaking Bad, was a Netflix exclusive and the reason many people took out a subscription in the first place. At this year’s Emmy Awards, Netflix won more nominations (54) than any network, other than Fox and HBO.
The sheer weight of Netflix video traffic places a huge burden on the internet. Netflix alone accounts for more than one-fifth of all network traffic in the UK and Ireland, according to Sandvine, which is why all of the major ISPs now have Netflix caches in their own datacentres, so that the HD streams don’t cripple their networks
The company continues to spread its reach: Netflix is available in more than 60 countries and has more than 80 million subscribers, growing at a rate of around 10 million per year. This is despite Netflix “ungrandfathering” long-term subscribers, who were afforded a two-year freeze on the price increases imposed on new customers. Will Netflix become the biggest broadcaster on the planet? We certainly wouldn’t bet against it.
