What are some important internet companies we seldom hear about?

Their strategy has been to focus on conversion optimization. That means the chance of a user ending up booking a hotel given that they visit Booking.com’s site is much higher than other hotel booking services. The result is that they make significantly higher revenue per visit than their competition, which then allows them to outbid all of them in ad spending, because a click is worth more to them than anyone else. I heard they were the #1 advertiser by revenue on Google Adwords at one point.

The fact that they are based in Amsterdam, they are owned by a company whose brand is a smaller internet product, and most of their traffic comes from ad spending, makes people forget about them, but they are one of the biggest and most profitable internet companies.

Montreal (technically HQ in Luxembourg) has to take the cake. The company is basically the king of online porn. They have some of the highest traffic properties on earth, as they have monopolized adult content (Pornhub, Brazzers, etc). They also have expanded into other verticals because of the sheer amount of cash. They stay under the radar for obvious reasons.

A leader in Web Design, IT, Web Development and SEO

Also, ironSource in Israel. They are an absolutely huge player in the distribution of software, including much of what some would consider adware. Their platform powers PPI (price per install) bundles.

We don’t hear about them because of their location and their desire to stay out of the spotlight, but the company is certainly valued over a billion US.

Verisign - they host the .com domain.

InternetX - they run DeCix, the German Internet Exchange hub, which more or less connects Germany to the Web.

Teradata - they run some of the biggest data centers in the world. Services like Apple iCloud would not be possible without them.

Foxconn - they manufacture almost all mobile Apple products - and many more.

I dont know about important, but Digital River is a significant one.

It was one of the first(if not the) to capitalize on software downloads. They specialize in providing services to software companies around distributing their products. Why they are more important than other companies like this is the first point in this paragraph, and that they pretty much have the most of the large players in the anti virus industry; Kaspersky, Avast, AVG, Symantec, all run through Digital River. They’ll also doing the same thing with micro transaction in video games; all in game transaction from Bethesda, Arenanet, 2K and some of Ubisoft involve DR.

But the company is currently in a sad sate, running on a platform built in 2000, unwilling to invest in R&D, offshoring everything which is causing a talent exodus and corrupt executive are all leading causing to the companies collapse.

This company is one of the bigger reasons modern networking is as fast as it is. From data caching to front-end optimization and lots of points in-between, a great deal of the World Wide Web is touched by this company.

Never worked for them but I know some people who have. It’s a geek haven.