How Forbes got mobile readers to increase their time

Lucia Moses of Digiday writes about how Forbes magazine got is mobile readers to increase their reading time.

Moses writes, “Forbes, which usually sees half its traffic coming to it this way in any given month, felt the problem firsthand. ‘The industry’s just shrunk to fit the phone,’ said Lewis D’Vorkin, chief product officer at Forbes. ‘It was a traditional storytelling format for a device that requires a more visual storytelling format. Mobile audiences in my mind want a different kind of experience.’

“So six months ago, D’Vorkin decided to come up with a new way to present news for the mobile web. Forbes, no stranger to reinvention, having been early in letting outside contributors and advertisers publish alongside its own journalists, created card-like formats to replace text-based stories. Forbes tested this new format with 26 articles, focusing on its list-based ones like ‘America’s Top Colleges‘ and ‘America’s Richest Self-Made Women.‘ For the latter, each woman is represented in a photo on the home page; clicking on each reveals a series of cards with data and information snippets about the person.

“Forbes tested the visual formats with 60,000 users, mainly people coming from Facebook. The experiment was limited, but the results were striking: time spent on the new mobile experience overall was at least twice that of the current one.”

Read more here.