What’s behind Forbes plan for new delivery formats

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about the business magazine’s plans to expand into new delivery formats.

Dvorkin writes, “In a related first, we released a batch of VR videos (360 videos on mobile devices, full VR experiences with goggles) shot at the FORBES 30 Under 30 Summit in Boston last October. Mandt VR, working with our partner PodcastOne, calls the effort the first of its kind. Most VR projects are singular experiences. The 30 Under 30 VR video is a serialized undertaking — a trailer, 10 full-length videos (here’s one of Jessica Alba) and 20 individual clips (here’s one of football star Martellus Bennett). It adds up to more than an hour of VR programming. All the videos can be found at the PodcastOne 360 YouTube Channel using a Chrome or Firefox browser (Safari doesn’t yet support 360 video).

“The Snapchat initiative speaks to our strategic thinking and goals for 2017 — to take our deeply reported and expert content off-domain. Given its size and influence with young audiences, releasing elements of the FORBES Under 30 list exclusively on Snapchat made perfect sense. We’ve already started producing content for other audiences — audio on Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home Assistant and PodcastOne. This year, we plan to go wherever our current and future audiences may be (see the diagram above), not necessarily expecting they will jump to Forbes.com.

“Forbes.com has grown dramatically in the last six years, to a record audience of 56 million unique visitors in November (as measured by comScore). It’s a significant accomplishment in a disaggregated and increasingly mobile-obsessed media world. Still, there are new audiences to be found by creating full content experiences (as opposed to links back to our site) on other platforms.”

Read more here.