Forbes.com hits 49 million visitors in July

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about the business magazine’s web traffic and its future plans.

Dvorkin writes, “Last month, Forbes.com hit a record 49 million monthly unique users, as measured by Omniture. Three years ago it was 15 million; two years ago, 18.5 million; and last year, 31.5 million. That means our audience marched steadily higher — 225% over three years. comScore measures traffic through audience panels. It also attempts to de-dupe consumers who access a site using multiple browsers. The count is different, the story the same: Forbes.com had a worldwide audience of 25 million in June 2013, up from 10 million three years earlier. We moved past all competitors in our category.

“Now, for what comes next (with stats behind the stats behind the stats) — and perhaps our most exciting project yet.

“The Contributor as Partner: Our one-of-kind contributor model sits at the core of our content strategy (you can read about it here). During tumultuous times for the media industry, we’ve forged long-term relationships with hundreds of journalists, authors, academics and other topic experts. They are not employees, but many participate in our online community newsroom, exchanging ideas with staff editors and reporters. They are certainly more than freelancers, incentivized for individual performance (the formula: 1x for a one-time monthly user, 20x for a repeat user) rather than paid a flat fee or by the word. All our writers benefit from each other’s work. The network effect of the Web (375 posts per weekday x 1,100 contributors) is a powerful force (think Metcalfe’s Law). Our underlying site architecture plays a critical role, too: 40% of our monthly traffic is to content at least 60 days old; social referrals hit a record three million during one week in July; 43,000 different sites referred traffic to us in June . Our ties with contributors will soon get even deeper. More will write for the magazine and publish online, too.”

Read more here.