Every year the Silicon Alley Insider / Business Insider ranks the most valuable Internet start-ups. Tudou made the list for the 3rd year in a row, this year SAI put us at place 15 with a valuation of USD 1.5 billion. No comment on that valuation from me, SAI explains how they get to our valuation in their post. Like I said last year as well, the list is rather arbitrary (Spil Games is again missing from the list, they absolutely belong on here), but it’s nice to see how “outsiders” look at the company.
This year’s winner is of course Facebook, no surprises there. Online game company Zynga managed to get to #2, followed by Wikipedia, Skype, Craiglist and Twitter. Among Chinese companies Tudou is number 2, the first one is Taobao (the Ebay of China) at #12. Tudou competitor Youku made the list for the first time, they ended at #27 with a USD 500 million valuation.
Funny thing is that when I saw the post in my RSS feeds I was on a very short stop-over in Tokyo en route to San Francisco, and I just quickly glanced at the article without really reading it. I thought they had given Tudou the same USD 500 million valuation as last year and I also tweeted that and put a link on Facebook. When I landed in SF I received several comments and emails from people letting me know that I was 1 billion dollars off… 🙂