Forbes seeing strong mobile growth

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer of Forbes, writes about the three opportunities facing publications these days, and reports about the business magazine’s strong mobile growth.

Dvorkin writes, “In August 2012, mobile traffic to Forbes.com represented 25% of total visits. Last month, it was 35.5%. In each case, smartphone visits were more less double tablet visits. Mobile page views tell a similar story.

“In August 2012, smartphone pv’s (U.S. only), were 9% of our total page views. Last month, they were 15%. Industrywide numbers like that have led to the battle cry of Mobile First, a somewhat flawed effort to focus on product solutions before ad solutions. At the moment, ad agencies and their clients aren’t ready for mobile. They can’t come to grips with the smaller screen. Search is a $20 billion digital business; display, $18 billion (with banners representing $10 billion); mobile $8 billion (with search text ads accounting for $4.5 billion); and video, $4 billion.

“How do you get marketers more comfortable with non-search mobile ads? For FORBES, first comes BrandVoice. We believe the headline for a BrandVoice post is essentially the better display ad on mobile devices. Those headlines, pre-pended with the marketer’s name, fit the screen perfectly and are part of the natural flow of editorial content on our smartphone experience. Second comes the new screens we’ll soon be rolling our for desktop consumers.

“We’re replacing page views with intelligent streams of content (post after post after post). We’ll progressively load ads on those screens, meaning the number of ads is determined by the depth of the scroll. We’ll also integrate new native ads units. As we migrate the desktop experience to mobile, we’ll do the work to make the experience — and the ad units — responsive to the smaller screen.”

Read more here.