The 20 Most Important People on the Web
Despite what Time magazine would have you believe, you are not the most powerful or influential person on the Web. At PC World we love online personals, social networks, and videos of people falling on their keisters as much as the next person, but without the folks who create the Craigslists, MySpaces, and YouTubes of the world, much of the Web's potential would be lost among spam sites and other online detritus.
So who's making the biggest impact online? We considered hundreds of the Web's most noteworthy power brokers, bloggers, brainiacs, and entrepreneurs to figure out whose contributions are shaping the way we use the Web. We whittled the list down to the top 50--well, actually the top 62--people, but as you'll see, there are some you just can't separate. And don't despair: Get a little more traffic on your Web site, and you may show up on the list next year.
Important People #1 through #5
1. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey BrinExecutives, Google
When your stock price can top $500 a share, you're collectively worth $33 billion in cash, and you run the most trafficked search engine on the Internet, you can afford to do, well, pretty much whatever you want. Sergey Brin and Larry Page's little project from Stanford has grown into the Web's most talked-about powerhouse, and one of the few names on this list to have morphed into a verb. Schmidt left Novell to join the board of directors at Google in 2001 and soon became the company's CEO. Having conquered the online advertising world, Google seems to be gearing up for an acquisition spree, its headline-grabbing purchase of YouTube marking a big step toward complete domination of the Web.
2. Steve JobsCEO, Apple
No doubt you're sick of the media bonanza surrounding the every move of Apple's CEO, but when one man's appeal for DRM-free music reverberates around the world, it's hard to ignore the power he wields. Jobs popularized legal music downloads and legal TV and movie downloads. And though the iPhone won't be released for five months, its demonstration at
MacWorld Expo suggested that this product might finally popularize Internet browsing on a mobile device.
3. Bram CohenCofounder, BitTorrent
P2P systems like KaZaA and eD are so last year. The future is all about BitTorrent, the brainchild of math wizard and programming wunderkind Bram Cohen. BitTorrent, developed in 2001, has gained in popularity as a way to download large files (like movies) by sharing the burden across hardware and bandwidth. The technology's adeptness at handling large files got Cohen in trouble with the Motion Picture Association of America, which ordered BitTorrent to remove copyrighted content from its network. But that setback hasn't slowed it down. Reportedly, more than a third of all Web traffic now comes from BitTorrent clients. BitTorrent and the entertainment heavyweights have since joined forces. The newly released BitTorrent Entertainment Network launched recently with thousands of industry-approved movies, television shows, games, and songs for sale and rental.
4. Mike MorhaimePresident, Blizzard Entertainment
In the world of online gaming, there is World of Warcraft and there is everything else. With 8 million players worldwide, Blizzard earns about $1.5 billion a year on WoW. And each player is breathlessly beholden to Mike Morhaime for the chance--if it ever comes--to obtain that Blade of Eternal Justice. As with Second Life (see #17), entire real-world businesses are based around the game. Unlike Second Life, though, these businesses--which exploit the WoW economy and gameplay--are not entirely welcome.
5. Jimmy WalesFounder,
Wikipedia
Many onliners treat Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as their first and last stop in researching a topic; and its user generated content has become so reliable that Nature magazine declared it "close to [Encyclopaedia] Britannica" in accuracy. The site has been cited as a source of information in more than 100 U.S. court decisions since 2004. But its popularity has also made Wikipedia a target for spammers--so much so that Wikipedia temporarily blocked the entire country of Qatar from making edits. To thwart spammers, Wales decided to slap "nofollow" tags on external links, telling search engines to ignore the links in order to avoid artificially inflating the search engine ranking of the link targets. This strategy ensures that Wikipedia's prominence in search results will continue to grow. But Wikipedia may just be the beginning for Wales. He recently launched his own search engine, WikiSeek, which searches only sites mentioned in Wikipedia.
Important People #6 through #10
6. John DoerrVenture capitalist, Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers
A former salesman for Intel, John Doerr has been the king of Silicon Valley venture capital for 27 years, investing in tech businesses ranging from Sun Microsystems to Amazon.com to Google. Jeff Bezos (see #24) once described Doerr as "the center of gravity in the Internet." He has also put his money behind his politics, backing controversial state ballot initiatives in California involving alternative energy and stem-cell research.
7. Craig NewmarkFounder, Craigslist
His Web site has no ads, charges absurdly low fees to a small fraction of its visitors, has a ".org" domain, and employs 23 people. Yet despite its humble appearance, Craigslist racked up 14.1 million page views last December and was the 52nd most viewed site last December according to comScore Media Metrix. Newmark's Craigslist has become an addiction for many, who impulsively refresh the listings of free stuff, "rants & raves," and personal ads while shirking their day jobs. Most importantly, it has almost singlehandedly demolished the offline classified advertising business. (In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, one study found, the site drains up to $65 million annually from local newspapers' help-wanted ads.) Take that, old media!
8. Peter LevinsohnPresident, Fox Interactive Media
Fox Interactive Media, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, is one of the Web's most powerful entities, controlling 13 sites that range from uber-popular MySpace.com to controversial FoxNews.com. A complement to News Corp's array of traditional film and television properties, this Internet-focused division ranked among the top 10 visited properties in the world in December 2006, according to comScore World Metrix. And there will probably be more to come, as Fox Interactive still has $2 billion in acquisition money to play around with, according to TechCrunch (see #30).
9. Marissa MayerVice president for search products & user experience, Google
Google's product czar oversees the search giant's increasingly diversified list of Web services and tools, such as Google Maps, Google Desktop, and Google Base--an eBay-esque e-commerce service. The first lady of Google joined the company as its first female engineer in 1999 (she was approximately employee #20) and worked on developing Google's now-familiar minimalist look. But don't accuse her of all work and no play; according to Google's Web site, she organizes employee movie nights.
10. Chad Hurley and Steve ChenFounders, YouTube
Despite Google's acquisition of the company, YouTube founders Chad Hurley (CEO) and Steve Chen (CTO) look like they'll be shaking things up for some time to come. The Internet video kingpin announced plans to pay users for videos, and it has signed several big-media content partnerships (with MTV, NBC, Warner Music, and others). Fellow co-founder Jawed Karim left the company to pursue a master's in computer science at Stanford University.
Important People #11 through #15
11. Kevin J. MartinChairman,
Federal Communications Commission
He may look innocent and unassuming, but Martin is arguably the most powerful bureaucrat on the Web. He took over the reins of the FCC in 2005, and to date he has encountered minimal controversy and none of the scandals that predecessor Michael Powell suffered. But that doesn't mean he couldn't cut off your Internet connection like that if he really wanted to.
12. Brad TempletonChairman of the board, Electronic Frontier Foundation
If you've ever found yourself on the wrong side of an electronic copyright or privacy scuffle, you know that Brad Templeton and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are your friends. They've defended file-sharers sued by the Recording Industry Association of America and filed complaints against America Online for disclosing subscriber search terms; currently they're fighting to unmuzzle bloggers who published leaked documents related to Eli Lilly's alleged misrepresentation of side effects of the drug Zyprexa. Templeton's passion about copyright and free speech is not surprising. The Web publishing veteran got his start back in 1989 when he founded ClariNet, a company that published what Templeton calls "the Net's first newspaper."
13. Henry ChonCEO, Cyworld
Don't call Cyworld a Korean MySpace; MySpace is an American Cyworld. In South Korea, an estimated 25 percent of the population (and 90 percent of people in their teens and twenties) have Cyworld accounts, where individuals design miniature animated avatars to represent them in its unique online space. In 2006 CEO Henry Chon brought Cyworld to U.S. shores. Though Cyworld hasn't yet achieved comparable success here, MySpace shouldn't rest easy if Chon's track record is any indication of future competition.
14. Shana FisherSenior vice president for strategy and M&A, IAC/InterActiveCorp
IAC/InterActiveCorp chairman and CEO Barry Diller loves his online enterprises. After a buying binge, IAC now owns Ask.com, Citysearch, Expedia, Match.com, Ticketmaster, and a host of other service-oriented Web businesses. But who tells Diller where to plunk down the cash? That would be his mergers and acquisitions advisor, senior VP Shana Fisher, who determines exactly where and when IAC should invest. Her control over IAC's purse strings makes her arguably the most powerful woman on the Internet.
15. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus FriisFounders, Skype and KaZaA
It seems like Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis just can't stop themselves. First they built the popular (though malware-addled) peer-to-peer file-sharing network KaZaA; then they followed that endeavor up by building the amazingly popular VoIP software Skype. After selling Skype to eBay (see #28) for $2.6 billion, the duo has gone back to the drawing board to produce Joost (formerly "The Venice Project"), a P2P video distribution service that is currently in private beta form. Will Zennstrom and Friis pull off a trifecta of killer apps? After being forced to settle an RIAA lawsuit over KaZaA for more than $100 million, they are negotiating directly with content providers as they prepare for Joost's official launch.
Important People #16 through #20
16. Matt MullenwegDeveloper, WordPress blogging site and software
Matt Mullenweg can barely buy a drink, but this 22-year-old open-source enthusiast developed WordPress, the open-source publishing software favored by blogging diehards around the world. In 2004, WordPress became well-enough known that Web publishing powerhouse CNet hired Mullenweg to work on it and other projects. Mullenweg quit in 2005, however, to work full-time on WordPress, which today is more like a content-management system, with various templates, widgets, and plug-ins, and Askismet antispam protection (we reviewed the service in January 2007.)
17. Philip RosedaleCEO, Linden Lab
Philip Rosedale took the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) concept and spun it into the Web's most talked-about virtual destination: Second Life. But don't call it just a game. For more and more "residents," Second Life has become a first life, where they can do everything in the virtual world from getting married to launching businesses that exclusively within the site's confines. Many real-world businesses have opened Second Life branches, too. In fact, Second Life has become so popular that the inevitable backlash has begun: Nick Denton's Valleywag (see #45) has compared the game's economy to a pyramid scheme
18. Jon Lech JohansenCreator,
Better known as DVD-Jon, Jon Lech Johansen is the Norwegian hacker who broke the encryption system used on DVD movies, thereby allowing them to be copied. He released the DeCSS decryption program in 2002 and was promptly prosecuted in his homeland. Eventually acquitted, Johansen went on to crack Apple's iTunes DRM (repeatedly) while working as a software developer in the United States. Beaten to the punch in cracking high-definition DVD formats by the still-anonymous muslix64, who created "backup" programs for HD DVD late last year and for Blu-ray Disc in January, Johansen nonetheless remains the renegade that big media fears most.
19. Jerry Yang, David Filo, and Terry SemelExecutives, Yahoo
Google's product innovations and its blockbuster purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion may have pushed Yahoo out of the limelight, but the Web giant led by founders Yang and Filo and CEO Terry Semel are fighting back. In the past two years, Yahoo has acquired online photo-sharing site Flickr and social bookmarking site Del.icio.us. It also continues to launch new properties such as Yahoo Food and Yahoo Pipes (for creating custom data feeds). Yahoo's recent switch to the Panama advertising platform represents another attempt to recapture ad revenue from Google. (Full disclosure: The author of this story writes a blog hosted at tech.yahoo.com.)
20. Jack MaCOO, Alibaba.com
Want to do business in China without springing for a plane ticket to Shanghai? Alibaba.com is your best bet. Founded by Jack Ma in 1999, this massively successful business-to-business e-marketplace is the best place online to meet people and trade proposals and product offers. (Ma has been quoted as saying that the firm got its bizarre start when he was kidnapped in Malibu and released on the condition he help his captor start a business in China.) In 2005, Yahoo (see #19) made a multibillion-dollar investment in Alibaba, which now runs Yahoo China. The venture recently became mired in scandal, when it provided information that led to the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist accused of leaking state secrets.
