How Forbes dominates Google search results

Lars Lofgren of Stone Press examines how Forbes dominates Google search results through Forbes Marketplace.

Lofgren writes, “Forbes has stated that Forbes Marketplace earned $22 million in revenue from Jan 2021 to Sep 2021. Multiplying by a third gives us an estimate of $29 million for all of 2021. Again, traffic was on a huge upswing during this period so I’m extremely confident that $29M is a conservative estimate for 2021.

“Now let’s get a traffic estimate for 2021.

Forbes Advisor started the 2021 with about 1.2M searches per month. And ended 2021 with about 4.6M searches per month. Let’s split the two and get a very rough average for the year: 2.9M searches per month.
Forbes Home Improvement can be ignored, it didn’t have any traffic in 2021.
Forbes Betting can also be ignored, it didn’t start until around July 2021.
Forbes Health did start around May 2021 and was earning 770K in monthly searches by the end of 2021. Let’s add another 500K in monthly searches for this. This overestimates the traffic in 2021 and will help make our final revenue estimate more conservative.

“So we have $29M in annual revenue on an average of 3.4M searches per month in 2021.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.