The 10 Most Innovative Web Companies

The web has completely changed how people interact, how business is done and basically the day-to-day life. To be influential in this economy, it is almost imperative to operate an efficient and consumer-friendly website. If you expect to be a top company without a website, you are bound to be missing a large percentage of the market share. These top 10 companies have created websites that have taken off at extraordinary paces and have many other companies following in their footsteps.

1. Twitter

In 2009, when Twitter began, they had around 20 million users and today they have more than 200 million! When the company first began, they were unsure of how they were going to collect money. They allowed users to sign up for free with no extra charges added. When the economy began to take an upturn, Twitter created ads that companies could buy that would cost them around $100,000 to purchase.

2. Google

Google has seemed to stay at the top of their game ever since they entered the web economy. They have been ever expanding ever since creating the Google website with all different things that users can "play" with. With all of these applications that users were freely allowed to use and view, it was also unsure for Google how they were actually going to make their money in the beginning. Google then created AdSense and AdWords for companies to be able to advertise and show up in their search results. In addition, Google also created Google Instant which has a 98% adoption rate. There are approximately 2 million searches a second and 3 billion per day.

3. Zynga

Zynga is the company that created the FarmVille game for Facebook. With their 400 million dollar return from the game, they decided to create CityVille which was released in January. After only a month, CityVille had 100 million users, making it the number one app on Facebook. Presently, the Zynga companies net worth is estimated to be $7 to $9 billion. At the rate that this company is going, they can only see the bright future ahead.

4. Netflix

Netflix began by their mail-in DVD business. In order to block out the competition, Netflix began streaming services in the United States and in Canada. From 2010, it is estimated that Netflix profited approximately $2.2 billion in revenues. Netflix has more than 20 million subscribers which has in turn basically over-run BlockBuster.

5. Foursquare

Defending its competitive position, growing exponentially, and making check-ins a must-use marketing tool for major brands. Astronaut Douglas Wheelock earned the NASA Explorer Badge when he checked in while orbiting the Earth; a story that reflect Foursquare's meteoric rise. The company now hosts around 7.5 million users, a 50% increase from September 2010.

Most significantly, the company has steamed ahead in the face of growing competition from Gowalla, Google Latitude, Loopt, and especially Facebook Places. It launched a brand new version of the service in March, unveiled an innovative merchant platform, and has some half billion check-ins in the last year alone.

6. Tumblr

For turning stray thoughts into big business. The New York based almost Twitter except without the "how many characters you can use" restriction, is drawing around 30,000 new members each day. More impressively, around 4 billion page views per month. In November, it scored between $25 million and $30 million from investors, bringing its total past $40 million.

7. Crimson Hexagon

For developing a revolutionary way to monitor and measure Twitter chatter. Crimson Hexagon began at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science but has grown into the prime analytics tool for HP, Microsoft, and CNN, which use the website to gauge public perceptions.

The company monitors the Web, tracking and learning the specifics of what people are saying in social media in real-time. Beyond the positive-or-negative analysis of keyword and semantic searches and with as much as 97 percent accuracy.

8. Stocktwits

Created the CNBC of the digital age. On this site, live streams are pulled from Facebook and Twitter; recently acquired service Abnormal Returns culls the best financial news stories from the Internet; weekly Webinars and video market recaps are offered; and StockTwits.tv features original programming around the clock. In other words, StockTwits has become an indispensible real-time financial tool for the social media age. It also boasts more than 300,000 monthly unique hits.

9. Microsoft

Reinvented their search market competition with Bing, the only REAL Google challenger left. Thanks to strategic partnerships with Kayak, Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook, Bing has begun nipping away at Google's market share and kept competition from becoming a monopoly. Earlier this month, Bing became the second most-popular search engine worldwide.

10. Conaco Productions

Kept Conan relevant long after he was yanked off the air. Even after his unfortunate departure from NBC, Conan O'Brien kept his brand red-hot thanks to a squad of 8 full-time Team Coco Digital staffers running his social media like pros.

The millions of views on YouTube, hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook, and millions of followers on Twitter. To hype his TBS show's November debut, Conan's team also started a 24-hour live webcast of the production, built fan pages on Flickr and Tumblr and launched a bright orange Conan blimp, which spotters could check into on Foursquare.