Revamped Forbes website gets 'record-setting' traffic

Forbes has announced "record-setting" figures for visitors to its recently revamped website Forbes.com, with 24.6 million unique visitors during January 2013, an increase of 42 per cent since January 2012.

This comes after a new publishing model, spearheaded by Forbes's chief product officer Lewis D'Vorkin, was introduced in 2010.

"The current models are broken," D'Vorkin told Journalism.co.uk. "They're broken because the advertising world is changing, because the media world is changing. In the world of digital publishing and social media those old models are broken so new models must be found."

According to the Forbes, comScore has recorded an 104 per cent increase in unique monthly visitors since the project began in June 2010. They keystone to Forbes's new model, which a has been in creating a network of 1,000 expert contributors alongside full-time staff writers who can produce 400 to 500 original pieces of content for the site per day. When this is combined with the Forbes global brand, smart SEO techniques and a focus on social media interaction the results have seen a dramatic rise in traffic, as this interactive graph shows.

Over the last two and a half years we've become a product machineLewis D'Vorkin

"The world of digital content creation is about quality, quantity and variety," said D'Vorkin, highlighting how the combination of freelancers and staff writer are "creating the kind of quantity that's demanded by digital audiences today."

"And when you have great people producing lots of great content then you're looking at a tremendous amount of content that's available to search for and that's also available for people to share across all the different social networks."

D'Vorkin also mentioned how some of the necessary steps in rejuvenating the Forbes.com website have been technological in making the content more "searchable". He said that because a lot of content is based on social signals it was necessary to factor that into the platform, which has also seen Forbes.com's audience across social networks increase dramatically.

"Over the last two and a half years we've become a product machine," he said. "We're always releasing something new, something different, whether it's seen by the user or just bettering our platform."

D'Vorkin went into greater detail in explaining the model when speaking to Journalism.co.uk last August, and in November told us it was seeking more UK contributors.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk this week he stressed that this is only one model that has worked, while he also cited Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post and Gawker as examples of different models that have experienced similar levels of success.

The other models "are all new start-up media companies", he said. "I think, hopefully, it's a sign for other traditional media companies that there are ways to do it if you're willing to have an open mind and experiment."

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