Forbes.com seeks UK contributors as it plans further growth
A team of designers and technologists were tasked with rethinking the online experience and rebuilding the site from the ground up.
The Forbes.com team started gathering an army of ‘contributors’: freelance journalists, academics and experts who write for the title, many of them getting paid a fee in relation to the amount of traffic they drive to the site. There are now 1,000 contributors.
Forbes.com is now publishing around 500 pieces of content a day, often with 25 posts on the same subject. A banner at the top of the site tells readers how many new posts have been published in the past hour.
The shift to a different kind of publishing platform and a new model of online journalism has led to a dramatic increase in site traffic, Lewis D’Vorkin, chief product officer, told Journalism.co.uk during a recent visit to London.
He referred to figures from Omniture, reporting that visitor numbers have more than doubled in a little over two years: from 15 million unique users a month to 37.5 million.
Journalism.co.uk spoke to D’Vorkin to find out about the Forbes model for digital journalism, why a virtual newsroom proved vital when the Forbes office was closed during Hurricane Sandy, and how Forbes.com has ambitions to attract more UK contributors and “more European-centric content”.
