At present, in many developed nations, practically each business has online presence, whether it might be a brick-and-mortar (traditional business), a brick-and-click (a business which sells both in online and also at a physical location), or a pure-play (only online business without physical counterpart) enterprise.
Among the 100 most popular websites in 2009, pure-play websites forms most of the majority. According to ITIF 2010 report, 94 percent of the top websites were of pure-plays, where as just 6 percent were of brick-and-clicks. Search, social networking, and entertainment sites contribute for more of pure-plays. Such operations will obtain billions of dollars in online advertising revenue and provide employment to hundreds of thousands of employees.
According to the rankings of OECD ICT Firm, the leading Internet firms (firms which sell all or the intense majority of their products and services online) are some of the most outstanding businesses of the past decade. The top ten Internet firms in the OECD’s study are Amazon, Google, AOL, Yahoo!, IAC/Interactive, eBay, E*TRADE, Expedia, TD AMERITRADE, and Yahoo! Japan. All these firms collectively earned $58 billion and employed 100,000 individuals in 2006, with income increasing by 77 percent a year since 2000.