The Digital 100: The World's Most Valuable Startups
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Business Insider
Facebook tops our list again, with a valuation of $25 billion, up radically from $6.5 billion last year. Facebook continues to grow at a tremendous clip and now has more than 500 million users worldwide. The company will generate revenue of over $1 billion in 2010 and become cash flow positive.

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Rounding out the top five: Zynga, the social game developer; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia we think could be worth $5 billion if it tried to make money; Skype, which might go for $5 billion in an open market; and Craigslist, the wildly popular listings site that could coin money if it ever decided to do so.

Click here to scroll through the Digital 100 →

About The List

Last year, we expanded our original list, the SAI 25, into the SAI 50+. We valued and ranked some of the world’s leading private online companies.

This year we expanded our search and analysis yet again. We found a ton more companies that are earning a lot of money and / or growing their businesses rapidly. The result is this year’s new and improved "Digital 100" -- 100 of the world's most valuable private digital startups.

Notable companies not included on last year’s list include Groupon, the beloved daily deal site.

What's New

A lot has happened in the past year: The economy crept back from the beating it took the last two years, venture funding trickled in for category winners, and online advertising staged a comeback (of sorts). E-commerce and virtual goods sales, meanwhile, continued to hold up relatively well.

As a result, there are some changes to last year’s rankings. Most notably, LinkedIn, the professional networking site, doubled in value, perhaps reflecting the shift in job-hunting strategies with the rebounding economy.

Methodology

We used the same valuation methodology as have the last two years, which you can read about in detail here. Obviously, our valuations are only as good as the information we have, so please feel free to comment in the post or send an email to afusfeld@businessinsider.com.

The Digital 100 Top Ten:

1. Facebook

2. Zynga

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3. Wikipedia

4. Skype

5. Craigslist

6. Twitter

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7. Vente-Privee

8. Yandex

9. Betfair

10. LinkedIn

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See all in order →

Complete Coverage

In A-Z Order

The Complete List 1-100

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The Biggest Movers

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the hundreds of our users, companies, investors, and executives who have taken time over the past few months to submit nominations and share information with us. We thank our colleague Adam Fusfeld for performing most of the background research. In addition, we thank our generous sponsors British Airways and NYSE for making the project possible. The financial analysis was performed by Henry Blodget, Heather Leonard, Nicholas Carlson, and Adam Fusfeld, with additional research by Cooper Smith.

6. Twitter

Estimated Value: $3 billion

Last Year's Rank / Valuation: #15 / $1 billion

Business: Messaging, microblogging and social networking service

Location: San Francisco, California

More Info: About Twitter

CEO: Evan Williams

Investors: Charles River Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo

Naval Ravikant, Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Bezos Expeditions, Spark Capital, Digital Garage, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, Benchmark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley (nice IPO leverage), Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Digital Garage.

Sharespost Index

Analysis: Twitter, last year’s “it” start-up darling, is experiencing monster messaging growth. Tweets are up to 90 million per day, according to Twitter CEO Ev Williams. That's a ~450% increase from under 20 million a year ago and more than 1.5 tweets per day from the 145 million users. The problem for Twitter is traffic only grew 100% during the same period. That’s going to be troublesome over the long haul. However, the company recently unveiled New Twitter which will most likely lure more users to the actual Twitter site rather than having to go through third-party apps. That should, in the long run, help Twitter sell more brand advertising. The company will start pushing out paid Tweet ads (which function much like conventional display ads) more aggressively in the next few months.

The most recent round of funding (a year ago) valued the company at $1 billion. Unfortunately, we don't have any updated revenue or financial metrics to base our valuation on. That said, Twitter is unique. It has killed all of its competitors, and it continues to grow (albeit at a slower rate). The company is in the early stages of developing a business model, and early reports on the performance of its "sponsored tweets" is good. Google is NOWHERE in social networking, and it desperately wants to be. Microsoft, meanwhile, has finally pulled the plug on its own would-be Twitter-killer. If either of these cash-rich companies want to have a hope in hell of building a social business, they'll take a deep breath and write the check. Given the semblance of a business model, the vibrant ecosystem not to mention the untapped potential, we think $3 billion is a reasonable valuation. According to Sharespost secondary market, buyers give the company a valuation as high as $3.6 billion (with a low of $2.6 billion).