Forbes.com seeing strong traffic growth

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes how the business magazine’s content model online is driving traffic.

Dvorkin writes, “Our traffic statistics confirm the anecdotes, observations and theories. According to our internal Omniture numbers, we finished December 2011 with 27.8 million unique visitors, up 80% from a year earlier. Recently released comScore data for the same period put Forbes.com growth at 31%, the highest in the business category (we also grew the most consistently throughout the year). Social traffic, followed by search, drove those gains (I side with Ben on the ‘mechanistic’ nature of algorithms, but you can’t discount their importance).

“The same is true this month. A week ago, three FORBES posts were among the Top 5 most shared stories across LinkedIn’s 120-million-member social networking site. And so far this month, five social sites remain among our Top 10 sources of traffic (none were on that list a year ago). The Chartbeat table just above is a list of our Top 10 posts at a moment in time a week or so ago. The numbers to the right of the headlines demonstrate the depth of our connection with social audiences. Search traffic strengthened, too. In fact, SEO and SMO are colliding as the Google + universe evolves and Google News tracks social signals to determine its news selections.

“How did all this happen? I’ve been documenting that for the last year. First, comes our unique content-creation strategy. Then, the way we’re placing our authoritative journalism at the center of a social media experience. And finally, the evolution of Forbes.com into a platform that enables all voices across The Content Continuum — always fully transparent and labeled — to participate in our growing business forum.”

Read more here.