Forbes

Published eight times a year, Forbes features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. It also reports on related subjects such as technology, communications, science, politics, and law. It has an international edition in Asia as well as editions produced under license in 27 countries and regions worldwide. The magazine is known for its lists and rankings, including of the richest Americans (the Forbes 400), the 600 most notable young people under the age of 30 (Forbes 30 under 30), America's Wealthiest Celebrities, the world's top companies (the Forbes Global 2000), Forbes list of the World's Most Powerful People, and The World's Billionaires.^[6] The motto of Forbes magazine is "Change the World".^[7]

Forbes.com[edit]

Forbes.com is part of Forbes Digital, a division of Forbes Media LLC. Forbes's holdings include a portion of RealClearPolitics. Together these sites reach more than 27 million unique visitors each month. Forbes.com employs the slogan "Home Page for the World's Business Leaders" and claimed, in 2006, to be the world's most widely visited business web site.^[40] The 2009 Times report said that, while "one of the top five financial sites by traffic [throwing] off an estimated $70 million to $80 million a year in revenue, [it] never yielded the hoped-for public offering".^[16]


As of 2019 the company published 100 articles each day produced by 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing.^[41] This business model, in place since 2010,^[42] "changed their reputation from being a respectable business publication to a content farm", according to Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.^[41] Similarly, Harvard University's Nieman Lab deemed Forbes "a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism" as of 2022.^[43]


Forbes.com uses a "contributor model" in which a wide network of "contributors" writes and publishes articles directly on the website.^[44] Contributors are paid based on traffic to their respective Forbes.com pages; the site has received contributions from over 2,500 individuals, and some contributors have earned over US$100,000, according to the company.^[44] The contributor system has been criticized for enabling "pay-to-play journalism" and the repackaging of public relations material as news.^[43] Forbes currently allows advertisers to publish blog posts on its website alongside regular editorial content through a program called BrandVoice, which accounts for more than 10 percent of its digital revenue.^[45] Forbes.com also publishes subscription investment newsletters, and an online guide to web sites, Best of the Web. In July 2018 Forbes deleted an article by a contributor who argued that libraries should be closed, and Amazon should open bookstores in their place.^[46]


David Churbuck founded Forbes's web site in 1996. The site uncovered Stephen Glass's journalistic fraud in The New Republic in 1998, an article that drew attention to internet journalism. At the peak of media coverage of alleged Toyota sudden unintended acceleration in 2010, it exposed the California "runaway Prius" as a hoax, as well as running five other articles by Michael Fumento challenging the entire media premise of Toyota's cars gone bad. The site, like the magazine, publishes many lists focusing on billionaires and their possessions, especially expensive homes, a critical aspect of the website's popularity.^[47]


Currently, the website also blocks internet users using ad blocking software from accessing articles, demanding that the website be put on the ad blocking software's whitelist before access is granted.^[48] Forbes argues that this is done because customers using ad blocking software do not contribute to the site's revenue. Malware attacks have been noted to occur from the Forbes site.^[49]


Forbes won the 2020 Webby People's Voice Award for Business Blog/Website.^[50]