publisher / forbes
Forbes now delivers its content across a multitude of platforms including print, online, tablets and mobile
really pursue business ventures for so long. Now there’s a mad rush towards developing ideas and innovation. It’s only natural that a magazine that encourages entrepreneurship and free market practices will gain traction.
What plans do you have for further international expansion? Forbes: We have 26 licensed local editions right now, and we’re targeting 33 by the end of this year. We have eight local websites so most of the growth will be on the digital side as international catches up to the developed world in terms of new media.
How has technology impacted the brand? Forbes: From the very beginning, we did things differently than our major competitors in the magazine industry. I was actually a member of the group that co-founded www.
forbes.com back in 1996. We were one of the early adopters. We completely separated
www.forbes.com from Forbes magazine. By doing so, we grew our web site in the digital marketplace, without competing with print. We didn’t charge for subscriptions, we made the site open, supported by advertising. We became a much larger player on line because we took a risk and made www.
forbes.com a separate entity. And it paid off. A few years ago, just as it was right to
separate the business at the beginning of the dot-com media era, it was right to marry the businesses back together. www.
forbes.com was well-established and the marketplace was looking for integrated media, so reuniting Forbes print and Forbes digital was the right thing to do.
Mike Federle: In the last two and a half years, we have reinvented
www.forbes. com into a global publishing platform that puts authoritative journalism at the centre of a social media experience. That means building a community — a loyal audience — that consumes, comments and shares the content with others. We’ve stuck to our real journalistic
roots. We have a core group of full-time reporters, but we now also have about 1,000 contributors – experts in their field – whom we’ve carefully vetted and who now also post
fipp.com
on our site. This means we can write about more subjects than we’ve ever been able to do with just our editorial staff. We average 400-500 posts a day. Some contributors are paid, some are not. So, we’ve increased the diversity of content while maintaining high quality – and that’s driving record traffic. As an example, we had a significant month- over-month increase of unique monthly visitors from December 2012 to January 2013, a jump from 38 million to 46 million. And our digital revenues in 2012 were up more than 16 per cent compared to 2011. The technology platform that we’ve built is truly unique in our industry – and we’re already exploring opportunities to license our publishing platform.
How does this work alongside print? Federle: Forbes magazine has also continued to evolve. The magazine was redesigned more than a year ago – and its content is more relevant today than ever before. Much of our focus is on entrepreneurial capitalism. This was one of our core editorial themes right from the beginning. Over time, Forbes has been growing its audience of small business owners…expanding its coverage to include more start-ups and disruptors. This development is important because more and more people see entrepreneurship, innovation, risk-taking as the solution to many challenges. A testament to the magazine’s success: While we don’t have full-year newsstand
PUBLICATIONS AT A GLANCE
Forbes Media is comprised of Forbes and forbes. com, which currently reaches 46 million monthly unique visitors. Forbes, Forbes Asia and Forbes Europe attract a global audience of 5 million readers. The Forbes iPad app merges the power of print storytelling with social sharing and the web.
The company also publishes ForbesLife magazine, as well as 26 licensed local editions around the world. Other websites include ForbesWoman. com, plus the ‘RealClear’ portfolio (left) of
RealClearPolitics.com;
RealClearMarkets.com;
RealClearSports.com and
RealClearWorld.com.
issue 76_2013 | Magazine World |31
sales for 2012 yet, our newsstand sales were up in the first half last year compared to the same period in 2011 (according to AAM). The magazine industry, overall, was down in the first half. Our print publication is also seen as the front door into our brand. Its attributes – its ability to tell stories and profile some of the most powerful people in the world – remain the core first impression that we provide our readers. And in January this year, we introduced
an innovative tablet product that allows consumers to travel seamlessly between a magazine-based app and the endless information and conversation on www.
forbes.com. We had more than 115,000 downloads (in just over three weeks), which is a terrific rate. It’s on a platform called Maz. We discovered Maz, and we’ve embraced the platform. One of the founders came from Apple and designed the platform to go back and forth– from print, to digital, to social media – and we integrate them all. This gives people the best of the three. It gives us an opportunity to show what we’ve done on our digital side – the volume of content we have generated by those 400 posts per day. Someone reading our magazine can go to the tablet and then onto the website and see the commentary going on in real time about an article. Or they can follow on Twitter or Facebook.
What other platforms or brand »
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