"You see it in business history all the time: Sometimes outsiders see opportunities that incumbents don’t. We see it in media, too."
When Forbes.com went live, it didn’t have the audience or the content prowess, as we know today.
It was yet another print publisher ended up launching a website, at least that’s what it looked like at first. Soon, even with bouts from the TIME (Fortune Inc.) and Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times, Forbes managed to stand out and become one of the best publishers for business news.
There was a time when Forbes employees worked one week each month without remuneration and sent on leaves because of the scarcity of resources. But recently, the publisher announced a special bonus to its employees which amounts to 4.5% of the total income of their annual salary (Src). Forbes stood the test of time and in fact, won in all aspects of the media business – Reach, Revenue, and Remuneration.
Agreed, it had its fair share of flops. And, that’s why we’ve decided to study the growth of Forbes. After all, no one pulled it off successfully without some failed experiments.
Without any further ado, let us show you how much the publisher has grown – in terms of both reach and revenue.
David Churbuck, a technology journalist, former editor of Forbes Magazine, founded Forbes.com in 1997 and handled the media strategy until 2000 (Src). The idea was to design and run a frequently updated tool – with interactive datasets, directories, calculators, and lists. In fact, Forbes.com was initially launched with a motto of “tools not text”.
Suprisingly, Forbes had around 150k visitors a month and employed just 4 people to manage the online site.
At present, with the reach of 71.1M unique monthly visitors, the publisher has become #1 Most Shared Publisher on LinkedIn. (Src).
Furthermore, Forbes Inc. is dealing with 40 local licensed editions and more than 2700 journalists and staff members. In terms of social media reach, it has 75M+ YouTube channel views, 5k YouTube channel videos, 606k YouTube channel subscribers, and more than 45 million social media followers (Src).
Estimated ad revenue generated by Forbes.com is $86 million last year, with overall revenues went up by more than 18 percent, profits by 42 percent YOY. (Src).
To be frank, we can argue that Forbes.com is the eldest of almost all the news websites you’ve ever come across. The domain was registered in 1993 and the website was up and running by the end of 1996. But, when the publisher decided to try the Internet, they weren’t sure about what to do and how to do it.
So, they figured out getting an external investment will help.
Print legacy and standard concept will always do the trick. With the funds from BMW, Fidelity Investment Company, Intel, Oracle, Teleport Communications Group, and Stolichnaya vodka, Forbes.com redesigned the website and published it on WWW. The publisher asked for a commitment of $2,50,000 from each one of the investors (Src).
At the time, most of the digital magazines weren’t viewed momentous. The publisher tried to eliminate this belief by providing genuine editorial to its visitors.
For instance, the revelation of a fabricated story published by Stephen Glass, an associate editor of TRP, brought attention from all over the world to Forbes. The article “Lies, damn lies and fiction” became the biggest tool to build trust among its readers by the end of the 90s and has attracted more than tens of thousands of visitors till now (Src).
Everyone needs promotion. Though Forbes had a print legacy, it needed to market itself as the print and internet teams were siloed. Unlike NYTimes, Forbes.com was functioning as the separate entity – with different goals, editorial style, etc.
In 1999, to fill the website with a spate of visitors and grow the brand as fast as possible, the company announced its first major offline ad campaign and spent $10M on the same. The primary goals of the ad campaign were to increase traffic on the site, and advertising sales.
This was the first ad campaign meant for consumers, unlike previous ones that aimed at potential advertisers and agencies.
Forbes’ ad campaign contributed one-third of the budget to its radio-approach and ran a series of three 60-second radio programs in seven different countries to create some buzz among its people. The program was created to make its audience aware of the people who became opulent through the web.
By promoting the ad campaign, Forbes allured 2.5 Million monthly visitors in the month of May, which was an impressive milestone for a publisher at that time (Src).
After the retirement of James Michaels, executive editor of the magazine who swayed scores of writers and editors, the company was visibly affected by the recession and the later part of the decade wasn’t working out so well for it.
As a result, 2001 was one of the brutal ones for Forbes when the online magazine owner ceased the publication of Forbes ASAP and laid off several staff members (Src).
– Monie Begley, spokeswoman for Forbes.
The closure of the magazine isn’t just a piece of news for Forbes.com. The company was compelled to strategize its investments towards print and online. If you’re wondering what could be the reason, here are the probable ones.
– After the Dot-com boom, most are confused about technology. Forbes business readers weren’t as interested in tech comparatively, this, in turn, trimmed the readership.
– Forbes ASAP is not the first or the only victim of the slump in spending on technology. Ziff Davis Media, a publisher of tech magazines, closed several tech-oriented titles and went through a restructuring to continue the operation. During the same period, The Industry Standard closed amid a huge contraction of Silicon Valley ad spending (Src).
With the econ0mic slowdown, the publisher has to cut down its customer acquisition and retention costs. As a first step, the publisher picked ORB, it’s new online advertising agency which had been previously taken care by Avenue A since the genesis of Forbes.com. ORB was chosen by Forbes to handle its online advertising and offline advertising as well. The objectives of replacing advertising companies were to improve the quality of incoming traffic and thus, maximizing the customer attainment and retention programs at least possible price (Src).
Custom publishing is the traditional term for content marketing. Brands and companies deliver useful content to their target audience with the help of their own/partnered magazines and websites. In other words, it works like a sponsored content we see today, but the content wouldn’t sell anything at all.
It is there to help the audience to do what they like to do – easily. Forbes Inc., with its print magazine fame, bagged an exclusive partnership with WPP, then the world’s second-largest agency, wherein agency can utilize Forbes to run custom content on existing properties or create custom magazines for their clientele (Src).
This joint venture of Forbes with WPP handled everything from the editorial design of the magazine to its marketing in the United States and overseas.
As cited by the New York Times, it was one of the “slick alternatives” for traditional print publishers to keep up with the marketing investment and expansion to the web.
To connect with a greater number of advertisers, Forbes came up with a money-back guarantee. With this, Forbes tried to add strong marketers who were willing to spend more than $1,00,000 on forbes.com. Assuring them the effectiveness of the campaign, it promised to return all money if it doesn’t meet their expectations in 60 days of advertising. To measure the effectiveness of the campaign, Forbes partnered with Dynamic Logic, a third party company (Src).
In addition, Forbes utilized its brand recognition to get the word out. It partnered with Fox News Channel to broadcast its fast-paced business analysis program, Forbes on Fox. The main theme of this program was to let people know more about finance and business terms and forbes.com.
In fact, most of the publishers have the chance to partner with industry experts and titles to reach a new audience who’re likely to fall under their target market.
We’ve seen it before. Publishers with both print and online wings tend to support each other. When Forbes.com showed potential, the publisher used it to balance the declining print revenue. Similarly, when Forbes.com needed external investment, print legacy helped – in terms of funds and network.
For example, during the first quarter of 2006, ad pages were down 0.4%, according to Publishers Information Bureau. Forbes Group spawned an ad revenue of $63.8M which showed an increase of just 4.4% compared to the first quarter of the previous year. The company recognized that the numbers are saturating.
On the other hand, Forbes.com has grown exponentially – it’s then President and CEO Jim Spanfeller said that the ad revenues of the Forbes.com would “probably” exceed that of the magazine in about 18 to 20 months. (Src).
So, the company decided to focus on Forbes.com and use its revenue to expand Forbes magazines to other regions – particularly, Europe.
Without any doubt, Forbes had to experience losses, just like many other publishers, during the recession. But what’s different in this case is the reasons. The publisher didn’t just have to deal with recession alone, they’re more problems weighing down the publisher at the time.
Steve Forbes had many talents and interests towards the magazine, but his two presidential campaigns wiped out much of the Forbes’ fortune. Entire Forbes media underwent a loss of $90M, according to a report published by Fortune (Src).
As the publisher was acutely hit by the recession in 2006, for survival it had to sell 45% of Forbes media to an American private equity firm Elevation Partners for $300M. By selling most of the part of its “Capitalist tool”, Forbes tried to gather capital for the magazine. The Elevation Partners was the reason that pushed Forbes to add a division of businesswomen, prompting to find ways for increased revenue.
Though the publisher was well-known for its editorial content, Forbes magazine with its several disappointing blog posts like Attack of the Blogs, America’s Drunkest Cities, and Don’t Marry Career Woman was losing interests of its readers. By publishing such nonbusiness content, forbes.com attracted less than 6.6M monthly unique visitors in the US that was comparatively lesser than the Dow Jones and CNNMoney (Src).
To gain more control over the placement of the sponsored ads on the website, the publisher signed an agreement with Quigo, an ad targeting network company.
One of the major advantages AdSonar offered is that it conducts “bid-to-brand” auction, where a top-tier publisher can get higher bids from advertisers. In addition to this feature, the publisher was able to see what advertisers it is bidding on, and choice of their ad placements (Src).
Sidenote: Google AdSense didn’t offer the granularity/bid-to-brand auction. It was just contextual.
To cope with the falling number of visitors, Forbes has never hesitated to try new strategies. On March 15th, 2009 Forbes launched a CMO network – a platform equipped with essential news and content, analysis, and commentary. Forbes tried to engage CMOs, agencies, and advertising executives by providing them a platform to connect with others and keeping them up to date with industry insight.
It’s just not text. Forbes included stories, interviews, etc. in the form of videos (Src).
With its new sister sites (ForbesAutos.com and ForbesTraveler.com) and video content, the publisher managed to pull itself off of the recession. The 2009 Times report said that, while “one of the top five financial sites by traffic [throwing] off an estimated $70 million to $80 million a year in revenue, [it] never yielded the hoped-for public offering”.
We already saw how Forbes went beyond AdSense (the de facto ad network) to power its contextual advertising. The same happened again. In the first quarter of 2010, the online publisher shook hands with FatTails, one of the leaders in online ad optimization software.
Forbes utilized FatTaills’ PageGage Direct, a self-serve display ad serving platform, enabling the publisher to open direct sales channel to its advertisers which consequently increased the revenue, CPMs, and quality of ads to readers (Src).
Forbes entered into a partnership with Flite, a premium programmatic ad platform to enhance its ad strategy. With the help of Flite, Forbes introduced its new ad unit billboard “Jet Stream”, and a social ad module (a 300 x 600 unit). The addition of these custom units helped Forbes to stand out from the crowd and deliver better ad experience for the users.
Besides giving access to these ad units, Forbes allowed its advertisers to distribute their content on its site (Src).
Interestingly, the publisher realized the significance of ad viewability sooner than we might think. To meet the standards of the Media Rating Council and increase the rate of viewability for its website, Forbes also partnered with Moat, an analytics and measurement company.
Forbes entered the programmatic by the end of 2011. After opening its impressions to open ad exchanges, Forbes removed all restrictions including price floors. In the beginning, Forbes used Google DoubleClick (now, Google Ad Manager) to serve ads and also experimented with dynamic allocation.
When asked about the ad inventory management strategy, Forbes told AdExchanger that they don’t view their inventory as “remnant”. All the impressions have the same value and the publisher just use different (direct and indirect exchanges) channels to sell them.
After analyzing the desires of advertisers and marketers to create their own content, and publish it to various social media platforms or other company’s website, Forbes introduced a new product AdVoice.
The AdVoice enabled marketers or writers to publish their blog post directly on the Forbes’ webpage. It opened up a new revenue stream for the publisher and most importantly, both buyer and seller don’t have to worry about banner blindness anymore.
According to a Forbes’ spokesperson, AdVoice generated 3.3M page views by the end of 2011 (Src).
– Kevin Gentzel, Chief Revenue Officer of Forbes Media.
One of the boldest decisions made by Forbes is its Forbes Media Extension (FMX). FMX is simply a way for advertisers to reach more affluent readers in a trusted environment. FMX provides the environment (a network of vetted publishers with the affluent audience) and technology (Forbes Audience Segmentation Target – FAST) to target the right audience. The FAST technology of FMX combined Forbes proprietary user data and third-party data to create well-defined audience segments for retargeting (Src).
Falcon software, a digital publishing platform, has enabled the writers of Forbes.com to create and edit content easily. In addition, it made easier to search and upload pictures from a secure library, and publish content to different Forbes channel.
It, indeed, did the job for forbes.com – from 2010 to 2013, doubling the number of monthly unique visitors from 12M to 26M (Src). On November 11, 2013, Forbes signed on an agreement ALM to license the Falcon software.
Forbes had to cut down the software as it can’t dedicate enough manpower and investment to improve the tool every now and then.
To keep a record of the number of viewable impressions appearing on Forbes.com and offer guaranteed impressions to the advertisers, the online publisher made an agreement with Comscore Inc. that was known as vCE (validated Campaign Essentials) for its vBIG (validated brand increase guarantee) program which assured the advertisers that ad impressions are in-view. The advertiser will only be charged for ads that have had got a chance to deliver the desired advertising effect.
Forbes promised that it will return the advertiser’s money if it doesn’t reach 90% of confidence level for any of the brand metrics provided that advertisers must run a minimum of $2,50,000 on Forbes.com over a duration of 90 days.
In 2012, Forbes kickstarted the contributor model for independent publishers/writers/business leaders/other experts. With this new strategy, Forbes gave a considerable amount of freedom to its vetted contributors on the creation and publication of their quality on the Forbes website. This made the freelance contributors write about specific topics they expertise in without any restriction.
Contributors were provided with the same technologies as the Forbes’ own journalists. Forbes tried to keep the contributor model as simple as possible. Starting with the Content Curation section, the model included Most Popular Section, Follow on Forbes, and many other sections. Curation allowed the contributors to select relevant topics for its audience, whereas Most Popular looked at the number of shares or comments on social media, thus helping the editor to know about the status of an article. Sections like Follow on Forbes enabled readers to follow writers of their choice.
While most of the other publishers used to pay its contributors on the basis of productivity (per article, per word, etc.), forbes.com offered incentives to the contributors based on the number of unique visitors. This way, Forbes encouraged its contributors to build their community, and promote their content. As the contributors were responsible for their own content and its promotion, the contributor model offered a feedback loop of data that shared readership data and social sharing statistics.
Undoubtedly, the contributor model was one of the smart moves of Forbes. As this strategy included both content creation and marketing, the model yielded positive results to Forbes. Comparative to the previous year, the number of unique visitors to the website doubled making it to 30M (Src).
At the time when only two publishers – Buzzfeed and Huffington had sponsored content programs, Forbes established its native-advertising platform BrandVoice (then called AdVoice) for its advertisers, which aimed at helping marketers to elevate their presence in the digital world by republishing their ads on forbes.com, using the same CMS that journalists and editors use for Forbes.com.
BrandVoice contributed 25% to the company’s ad revenue with a collection of a sum of 33M page views, with more than 4,500 posts on the site.
For over a year, Forbes has worked with its DMP partner – Krux, which helped the publisher to utilize data from multiple sources – BlueKai, Bizo, and Exelate. By signing a contract with Krux, the publisher was having enough capability to know about its consumer’s interests without depending on any other third party like Comscore.
Forbes launched its new sponsored product “Pulse”, which is supposed to blend interactive and visual storytelling for marketers. The Pulse group creates editorial programs and BrandVoice as well. On April 23, Toyota became the first marketing partner that launched a BrandVoice campaign through Pulse program on Forbes.com (Src).
According to a report published by comScore U.S in November 2014, forbes.com acquired 31.4M unique monthly visitors which indicated a rise of 20.5% comparative to the same time in the previous year. Also, an estimated 45% of visitors checked the website via mobile which was a dramatic increase in the number.
Ad blockers are one of the reasons for a cut in the ad revenue, and thus lowering the publisher’s profits. On December 2015, Forbes took a step forward to get rid of this and started blocking ad blockers added to its user’s browsers. The publisher didn’t allow to access parts of its contents without disabling the ad blockers. Once the users disabled the ad blocker, it promised to offer them an ad-lite experience for 30 days (Src).
In early 2016, Forbes digital readership increased to 44.5M monthly unique visitors. Further, to enhance the quality of their ads, Forbes.com along with Conde` Nast, and the Times entered a partnership with Blis Prime, a London-based private programmatic marketplace, that will ensure their ads are geographically relevant to the audience (Src).
In 2017, slow and unreliable mobile sites were one of the greatest perils faced by publishers. That was one of the challenges faced by the Forbes when the mobile site Forbes.com ranked second to last with a start render time of 6.5 seconds, much more than the Financial Times, New York Times, and Business Insider.
To compete with others, Forbes.com relaunched its new mobile website as a Progressive Web App which brought loading time of the mobile site to 0.8 seconds, comparatively much faster than other sites.
A Progressive Web App (PWA), backed by Google, is a technology that works a bit more like a native app but takes less time to load and improves visual content and navigation.
According to the 2017 statistics of Comscore, the number of monthly unique visitors had climbed to 60M which was way larger than the issues of Inc., BusinessWeek, and Fortune combined.
With the introduction of microsites, the idea of bringing marketers to sell their brands on the webpage was quite a successful one for Forbes. The online magazine which has been dealing with its microsite 2.0 version for a few years, upgraded it to 3.0 in 2016.
The microsites are marketing content sites used by marketers, that offers consistent editorial experience to its mobile audience by keeping all content clearly tagged and recognized. The updated version of microsite made scrolling and browsing of data easier for its customers by framing content in a concise manner for its mobile site.
This enabled the marketers to display their brands clearly at a much lower cost than other publishers, and readers to perform their desired action easily. Keeping a mindset of desktop user, Forbes replaced the text-based story formats and added new card-like formats like video cards, text cards, quote cards, etc which can be accessed and shared independently (Src).
The reinvention of microsite 3.0 enabled outside publishers and advertisers to publish their content or ads alongside Forbes’ own journalists. These new changes in the visual format of Forbes’ mobile website showed surprising results for the publisher.
According to a Forbes’ spokesperson, 35% of users spent 10 minutes on the new format than an average of 4 minutes on the old mobile version (Src).
When Google introduced its Ad Experience Report – a tool that can evaluate websites based on their ad design and creatives – Forbes got the warning sign. The tool captures screenshots and videos of annoying advertisements to viewers. On the basis of this, it divided websites into two categories – failing and warning.
Forbes was one of the failing publishers among many other top publishers. To fix the site well, Google warned the publishers that if they don’t fix their websites and remove the disruptive ads from the site; all the ads from the web pages would be pulled off. This is one of the instances where the publisher is forced to cut down the ads and deliver a better experience.
Though Forbes managed to invest and continually improve the mobile and desktop versions of its site, ad experience wasn’t that great. The takeaway here is not to wait for someone to push you to better the UX. As a publisher, it’s always safe to stay below the critical level.
In July 2018, Forbes introduced its new content management system named “Bertie”. Bertie, an AI-based publishing platform, is designed for Forbes’ journalists, its contributor networks and BrandVoice partners, now available for senior editors in North America. It’s smart enough as it recommends articles to its contributors based on their writing history (outputs, headlines, images, etc.). In addition, it will make the consumption of media easier for visitors.
According to a spokesman, Bertie has indirectly increased the traffic on Forbes.com and helped the publisher to reach 65M monthly unique visitors (Src).
To simplify the cross-platform selling programs, Forbes divided its integrated 150 strong sales team into five – programmatic, native advertising program, media sales, insights, and Forbes live events. Besides this, the publisher split its sales team into two: pre-sales and post-sales.
The reorganized sales teams helped the publisher to allocate resources in a uniform manner. For instance, a client who wants to run programmatic ads can be allocated to a different team than the one who wants to run a native sponsored post.
This also provided a clear view of what’s working (programmatic or native or direct sales) well for the publisher.
In the month of October 2018, Forbes associated with Quantcast who has built Q, an Artificial Intelligence driven audience behavior platform. Replacing the old audience tool, Q helped the publisher by making its sales package data-driven.
Q, working as a DMP, accessed proprietary data from the Quantcast’s database and some other data providers and then created audience segments. As a result, this allowed the brand organizers to know about their onlooker’s preferences (Src).
“If there are 10 articles that index well [against that audience], we can think about how to build an editorial feature for the brand focused on those topics,”.
By the end of 2018, Forbes traffic had reached a 12-month high of 65M monthly unique visitors (Src). It has already started to work on the launch of Bertie to all its editors and contributors, in North America and Europe region.
If you look at the journey of Forbes.com, you can see how the publisher embraced the next big technologies, even before they went big and successful. It never failed to leap beyond the default options to grow its traffic and revenue.
Though the publisher had failed in a few initiatives, it never stopped to try and experiment. On all, it had a clear purpose.
One of the things that companies should always ask themselves in this tumultuous time of the Web is, “what is your purpose? ” If you ask yourself that question, you won’t get held up on the fact that the tools to achieve it may change, but the goals themselves don’t.
You may or may not emulate the strategies we’ve shown here, but take the lessons and go write your own story.