Timothy Forbes, scion of the Forbes publishing family and Chairman of Forbes Digital, sounds a positive note on survival of print in the digital age. While predicting that all media will be social media in the future, he says print and digital can’t be mixed, and Forbes’ digital offering is an entity by itself.
Timothy Forbes may seem, and sometimes even sound, like he belongs to the old school mindset of what the magazine business is all about. But for Chairman of Forbes Digital Tim Forbes - as he is better known - this mindset becomes his core tool. Tim is of the firm belief that a magazine is a magazine and digital is digital. To make Forbes’ digital presence an entity by itself, Tim and his team have taken an interesting approach towards Forbes journalism on the web and on the mobile medium.
Tim Forbes was in India for the newly instituted Forbes Leadership Awards, which according to him will become a key component of the Forbes business in India. He tells IMPACT, “The Forbes Leadership Awards is a powerful expression of what Forbes, as a brand, represents. You know the label is entrepreneurial capitalism, but underneath it is a very simple idea, which is that business exists to produce happiness and business succeeds by serving the wants and needs of others, including society. Money is a residue, if you will, of that process. But that’s what business is about, and we celebrate successful business people and entrepreneurs. With Forbes Leadership Awards, we are celebrating a greater contribution that business makes to social contribution and that’s what business does.”
Tim Forbes’ thoughts on Forbes Leadership Awards accentuate his way of looking at everything from a different lens. The digital approach of the company is no different and in this interview, Tim says how Forbes is constructing its digital presence, hoping to become a social media platform. Excerpts from a conversation with him:
Do you agree with industry conversations on how positive digital has turned out for the magazine business?
In a word, yes, but of course there is a lot underneath that ‘yes’. Digital has been disruptive and it’s in the process of utterly changing the medium of not just print, not just newspapers and magazines, but television and all media. The most important phenomenon in the last five years is in fact social media. As industry players, if we do not find a way to participate as social media, not in it but as part of the fabric of social media, we will not survive the future, as all media will be social media. This is about how digital is changing the way people interact with one another and convey information. We have to find ways to fully embrace social media.
It is interesting that you say everything will be social. What does that imply in business?
It implies a fundamental rethinking of the way journalism is produced, the way in which it is distributed and how journalists have to engage with audiences. It is no longer sufficient for a journalist to write a story, have it distributed and move on to the next story. In fact as a journalist, you need to take your users and readers seriously and work and engage with them. If you have posted something on the web and somebody posts a serious comment in response to that piece, you have an opportunity, and also something of an obligation, to engage with that comment. If you do, you create a follower. If you don’t, you’ve lost a follower. They’ll move on to somebody else that will take them seriously. It’s a different kind of interaction than the one that existed in print where it was one-way and yes, you might get letters disagreeing or disagreeing, but that was in the past. This is happening in real time.
Do you think as an industry, enough steps have been taken to take advantage of social media?
No, not at all.
Is there anything that probably stood out to be in the right direction? Any examples?
Well, we are very excited about what we’re doing at Forbes. Over the last 18 months, we have been in the process of fundamentally transforming Forbes.com. We have opened it up as a platform. It is now no longer just about publishing a Forbes story and republishing other material. We are aggregating a large chunk of contributors in different topic areas. A journalist’s job today is not only to print his or her own stories but to enlist contributors. Part of their job is to take people who used to be their sources and enlist them as direct contributors. We publish them directly. We do this by providing access to a set of tools for posting material. We also provide feedback and they have access to dashboards, where they can see how much traffic their post is generating in real time. We begin to learn about how to write things that maximize the potential impact of their stories. They are encouraged strongly to engage with comments and commentators.
What has been the experience so far?
The level of comment that we see coming in is usually quite serious. We encourage journalists to interact with them. We are trying to dramatically broaden the scope of coverage in these topic areas by engaging people and we pay contributors incentives, based on traffic generated. But essentially we are trying to become the center point of conversations and discussions around relevant topics. It will create a forum for ideas among serious practitioners and among people who are interested.
This also means that you have upped the editorial commentary on your site because contributors are directly making a comment without editorial checks?
That is correct. The editorial check is in selection of the contributor. You pick the contributor and we provide rules of the road, if you will. Not quite a stylebook but some rules and some education around what we expect, what is appropriate and what is not appropriate in a general sense and then you see how they do. If anybody doesn’t contribute frequently enough to build a bond or whatever, then you let some people go and bring some new people in. From an editorial point of view, it has moved from editing copy to editing talent and providing that talent with an opportunity to build their own brands and their own following.
Forbes has a lot of rich content on the website and readers get all this for free. As you make your web presence stronger, are there deliberations on how you can monetize your digital offering?
Well, the principal means of monetization for us in print and on the web is advertising, which has been true for decades. By and large, for the magazine industry in the US per se, I don’t think circulation revenue was ever a principal driver. After the cost of acquiring the subscriber, circulation revenue may have some small margin in it but it essentially means validating the wantedness – which it should sell to an advertiser. The web is different. You can show wantedness by traffic, repeat traffic and so on. The web is the ultimate transaction for the journalist, the marketer and for all of us. As a journalist, you know how many users a particular piece had, and while that can be scary, you learn from it. Let’s face it, we all want to have some impact. You didn’t become a journalist just to write for your mother. You can see that impact on the web, and as a marketer, you know the kind of interaction people are having.
But despite that, marketers are not paying for digital yet. In fact, publishers have ended up selling digital as an add-on to marketers in the past…
…Yes, we saw the same phenomenon in the US. It depends on how you view digital, but I can tell you that at least at Forbes, we never sold it as an add-on despite the desire of someone on the print sales side to do that. We always saw the web as the web, magazine as the magazine and TV as TV. You can bundle them but not as an add-on. They each have very different characteristics and value propositions to sell to the marketers. And if you are giving it away, that means you haven’t learnt the value proposition yourself, and you certainly won’t be able to communicate it to a marketer. There is a way to make the web work. We’ve had strong revenue growth since 2003. Pricing on the web, even for premium advertising, is under pressure partially because supply is greater. But the supply of quality is debatable. There are also other dimensions that you can monitor to monetize on web-based advertising as well as built around the data. The more you know of your users – what they are doing, where they are going, how they are interacting with content – you can create value around them. It’s not just media placement but it’s about the data and what you learn about your users.
Forbes has taken an interesting approach in the mobile apps space. Instead of taking Forbes the brand as an app, you made themebased properties, which connect it back to Forbes but essentially aggregate your content in a particular discipline. What really has been the guiding principle?
We are still in the early stages. Over the next year, you will see a dramatic evolution of what Forbes will look like on mobile. Over just the last year, you have seen a dramatic evolution on Forbes.com, both in the way it looks in terms of presentation but as I say more fundamentally how it’s actually put together in construct and you’ll see a variety of applications that will begin to launch. We do not at present have an iPad or iPhone version for a Forbes magazine. We may or we will anticipate in due course but that’s not our first impulse. Our first impulse is to create, as you said, theme-based applications around different topic areas. We started with Forbes Investing, Intelligent Investing, and Wealth list and so on. There is one coming out in a couple of weeks – that would be photographs and videos solely around various topics.
What is the kind of audience reaction to that?
Modest! The first app we put up over a year ago on investing has about a hundred and forty or fifty thousand users. We will treat mobile the way we treated web. The impulse was not to put the magazine on the web. The magazine is a magazine. It has its own dynamics, its own characteristics and its own form of interaction with the reader. That’s a different platform. Your screen on your desk or your laptop is a different platform than a tablet. The mobile is different. We should create products that are part of the brand and are reflective of the brand, that are constant with the brand and that create interest amongst users but are appropriate to the medium. As I said before, we are totally committed to the social media idea and finding what that really means - what Forbes is and should be as a social media proposition. It’s exciting and it’s daunting.
India has proved to be a very interesting social media market. If you look at players like FB or Twitter, India is one of their most important markets. So clearly, social appears to be the correct way for India. But the big question is that for a brand like Forbes, as a platform essentially known in the magazine business, how will you get viewers or readers to understand it from a social perspective?
Ever since we’ve made this transformation online, of how we present, what we present and how we construct online, we are seeing a substantial growth in traffic. Forbes.com enjoyed strong traffic growth from 2002 to 2008, when it plateaued for a variety of reasons. But what we’ve seen this year, versus last year and the beginning of the summer, is a 35-40 per cent year-on-year growth. We’re seeing significant change in terms of sourcing of traffic. We have seen FB and Twitter become strong sources. There has been a pickup in our search-driven traffic, which seems to be social-linked. We’re now publishing 354 posts a day. A year ago, that number would have a third of that. This is a process and it is still relatively early, but what we’re seeing is very encouraging. We are also rolling out some new products and services that we will sell to our customer base. For example, we have plans to sell professional education services under Forbes. We believe the kind of interaction with which the web is driven by, allows us to do many courses.
The last two-and-a-half years have been tough for media players all over and the magazine industry is also probably the worst hit. What were some of the learnings from this period that you think will influence your decisions in the days to come?
The last two-and-a-half years have been sober, no question about that. We’ve been on quite a significant expansion from the prior recession through the summer of 2008, and then a screeching halt. What we see now is to find ways to grow the business and not necessarily with large upfront capital expenditures. Then there also is the human expenditure. When you hire staff, you need to be very conscious and you want to do it carefully. We are again seeing some growth in print readership.
At the global level?
At least from a Forbes perspective, I can tell you that the magazine industry in the US is having a decent year. There are a number of titles that are seeing some growth this year. The readership of Forbes magazine was practically at an all time high last year. Consumers still like print products.
And there are publications in India that are seriously considering moving their brands to the digital platform completely…
What we are seeing is that there is no text book for the future. People are going to find different ways to address that dynamic and there is probably more than one way to get to the future. Print is a different experience. We have got plenty of devices and there is a Forbes Kindle edition, but it’s different from the magazine experience.
You don’t agree with people who say the tablet gave a new lease of life to the magazine industry?
No, I don’t. I really don’t. Almost two years ago, people confused something I had said because we did not immediately run and develop an application for our magazines. The discussions we were having at the time were construed to somehow indicate that iPad was a bad idea. No, the tablet is fabulous. But it’s not a magazine. Our focus was redevelopment of our approach to the web and how we became a social media platform; how we put journalism at the center of social media experience. It sounds nice. But what does that even mean? That took a fair amount of work and that was our priority. One cannot embrace the web world simply because it’s digital. A lot of first generation apps, including ours by the way, were flat. They were good for what they were but they were not the same as a magazine. Some apps have video and they were over produced but then again everybody has to find a way. The tablet is a very valuable place to express a brand differently, and we’ll see. But magazines still have life and the last couple of years have made that clearer. I never thought magazines would last this long. I had thought digital would take over more quickly, but the magazine business has managed to revise that opinion.
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