Top 4 Internet Businesses Run By Women

Posted on 10.02.09 | Comments

While the world of technology may seem to be male-dominated, there is an emerging breed of powerful female netpreneurs who are making their presence felt both in cyberspace and the business world. Melanie Lee lists our top four favourites.

Gina Bianchini (Co-founder & CEO of Ning)

This 36-year-old Stanford MBA graduate set up Ning, a popular social platform business with her former classmate Marc Andreesen in 2006 and has become a web celebrity of sorts with her charming networking skills and razor-sharp understanding of marketing on the Internet. She also sees meaning in her work, as seen by what she said during a New York Times interview, “One user told me that he and his wife were starting a site for parents of terminally ill children. Enabling those types of connections reminds me why we do what we do.” There are currently over a million Ning networks worldwide, with its business currently valued at US$750 million.

Arianna Huffington (Co-founder of The Huffington Post)

When millionaire socialite Arianna Huffington, 59, first set up news website The Huffington Post in 2005, it was seen as a showy personal indulgence. Today, according to Nielsen NetRatings, Huffington Post has over 3,000 contributing bloggers, 22 million unique user visits each month and is the most linked-to blog on the Internet. Its business is valued at over US$100 million. Known for being a Wonder Woman, Huffington has said in one of her Post articles, “Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me.”

Lisa Stone (Co-founder and CEO of BlogHer)

The former journalist, web editor and interactive media producer became interested in the potential of online communities for female empowerment and set up BlogHer, a group blog, in 2005 to connect women bloggers through conferences, a publishing network of 2,500 bloggers and a listing of 20,000 women’s blogs. “The more real relationships we have with each other as women blogging, the more we’ll be inspired and able to share what we know with each other and grow each others’ visibility online,” Lisa said in an online interview. They receive over 14 million unique visitors monthly and investors have pumped in over US$15.million into this business.

Natalie Massenet (Founder of Net-A-Porter)

Nine years ago, Natalie, a 41-year-old Londoner and a former fashion stylist and editor, foresaw that online shopping would play a big role in the fashion retail business in 1999. She painstakingly used her fashion contacts to get luxury labels on board and created a global fashion portal Net-A-Porter that combined editorial content and fancy delivery packaging with e-commerce. She has definitely proved her early detractors wrong with over 400 staff in London and New York, and generated a £55.2 million turnover in sales last year. “I was completely confident. I never thought it wouldn’t work. I never once thought it wouldn’t be huge,” she said in an interview with UK Sunday Times.

Jenny She

Hey, Eric! I am glad you think that is a great link! I love it too!

Clemence Ko

Hi there Jshe! I too like that link. Thanks for sharing a great link. It was also quite a topic on Twitter too as I found out recently.

Clemence Ko

Very inspiring indeed. Christine of From Dates To Diapers who is one of Nielson’s Top 50 Power Moms, is a Lifetime Mom, one of Wal-Mart’s “ElevenMoms” and a spokesmom/host for Johnson’s Baby. She is also a good example from my point of view.

Jenny She

This is actually not a surprise to me at all. Mashable ( The Social Media Guide ) has recently wrote that " Women Rule the Social Web "-- http://mashable.com/2009/10/03/women-rule-the-s.... This article stated that " when it comes to sites like Flickr.Facebook,Twitter. FriendFeed. My Space, women outnumber men.".