Kathy Haley of NetNewsCheck writes about the strategy at Forbes under chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin.
Haley writes, “Under Dvorkin’s leadership, Forbes departed radically from the path taken by most magazines and newspapers online, contracting with 1,500 writers, nearly all of them non-journalists, who would write columns, load them into the Forbes.com content management system and hit publish (Editor’s note: a Forbes spokesperson notes that one-third of its online contributors are freelance journalists).
“At the same time, the company opened its online pages to marketers, letting them publish their own content clearly labeled as BrandVoices, the company’s moniker for sponsored content.
“Despite a firestorm of criticism from journalists, the strategy produced a dramatic increase in Forbes.com’s audience. Unique visitors to the site’s business channel rose from 2.9 million to 14.3 million, Dvorkin says, while those to its technology channel climbed from 2.9 million to 12.3 million.
“The company recently had its most profitable year in six years and consistently ranks among the top ten most tweeted publishers and is the most shared publication on LinkedIn.”
Read more here.
