Several people, during the whole Forbes career woman debacle last week, expressed the suspicion that the whole thing was done to drive traffic to the site. Not a very well-thought-out plan, surely, considering that some 35% of Forbes subscribers are female, and quite likely the very career women that Michael Noer was warning the male readers of Forbes (or, more accurately, Forbes.com) about. Not to mention, many of their male readers are undoubtedly married to career women, though whether they’d take sufficient umbrage to cancel subscriptions is another matter.
Well. Seems that those suspicions were borne out. The NYT reports that traffic for Forbes.com has been down (along with subscriptions to the print version, which is a separate entity and apparently does not carry articles like “Don’t marry a career woman” and “Wife or whore? What’s the difference?” that appear in the web version). In fact, traffic may never have been as high as they’ve been claiming.
Its own ads proclaim that “more people get their business news from Forbes.com than any other source in the world,” saying that its sites drew about 15 million unique visitors in a single month earlier this year. It was a well-heeled crowd, according to Forbes.com, which says that the average household income of its users is $149,601.
Forbes’s Web prowess is a big reason Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that counts Bono of U2 as a managing director, agreed on Aug. 4 to buy a minority stake in Forbes’s publishing business. “Forbes has already won the first round” in the battle for Internet supremacy, an Elevation founder, Roger McNamee, said then.
But a closer look at the numbers raises questions about Forbes.com’s industry-leading success. For its claim of a worldwide audience of nearly 15.3 million, it has been citing February data from comScore Media Metrix, one of the two leading providers of third-party Web traffic data.
There are several problems with that statistic, though, and comScore has since revised the figure downward to less than 13.2 million as part of a broader revamping of its worldwide data for many sites. Jack Flanagan, executive vice president at comScore Media Metrix, said the new figures were released “a couple of months ago” after it changed its methods for estimating global audiences.
There is also the question, given Forbes.com’s user figures, of where those visitors were going. According to comScore, 45 percent of its February traffic went to ForbesAutos.com, a companion Web site heavy on car reviews and photos. About three-quarters of the ForbesAutos.com traffic came from outside the United States.
Since February, comScore said, Forbes.com’s traffic has tumbled. In July, Forbes Web sites drew 7.3 million unique visitors worldwide, almost a million of whom went to ForbesAutos. That put Forbes.com slightly below Dow Jones (whose online properties include The Wall Street Journal’s Web site and MarketWatch), CNNMoney.com (which includes the sites of Fortune and Business 2.0 magazines) and sites affiliated with Reuters, each of which comScore says had some 7.6 million visitors that month.
And regardless of how many visitors there actually are, they may not be the ones Forbes really wants to attract. Instead, they may be drawn in for the racy or controversial “lifestyle” content and never return:
Some competitors argue that Forbes.com’s popularity derives in part from racy, provocative or wealth-obsessed lifestyle features that have little to do with traditional business news — examples from this year include “The Hottest Billionaire Heiresses,” “Top Topless Beaches” and “America’s Drunkest Cities.” Those kinds of articles, unlikely to appear in Forbes magazine, may be a small fraction of those that Forbes.com posts each day, but they are often featured on mass-market Web portals. . . .
Still, some competitors say that while eye-catching lifestyle stories may attract lots of readers, those readers are more transient and less likely to be the kind of high-powered professionals that advertisers pay more to reach.
They also had a feature around the time of the career woman article called “How to Marry a Rich Man.” Someone in the comments at Lawyers, Guns and Money linked it, and I had a hard time believing it wasn’t an Onion parody.
I always feel a little bit weird about linking directly to something like that stupid article, because, yes, most of the time it just drives up the site traffic — which is usually what they want. But unlike in the case of some pissant blogger who’s trying to get attention by saying something outrageous, the blowback from the career women brouhaha may wind up hurting both Forbes.com and Forbes magazine in the end, due to the short-sighted strategy of increasing traffic at any cost. Serious advertisers, for one, might not be too happy about being associated with a magazine or website that purports to be about business but presents leering “lifestyle” content. Moreover, will businesses that are trying to work on recruiting and retaining women really want to be associated with a publication that undercuts what they’re trying to do by encouraging women to drop out of their careers to find a husband? And then there’s the reaction of those career women who are already influential business leaders:
Even if advertisers do not balk at Forbes.com’s provocative postings, some readers and business leaders might. Michelle Peluso, chief executive of Travelocity.com, told Salon last week that she thought that Forbes.com’s “career women” posting was “incredibly disappointing” and that she planned to speak with people at the magazine about it.
And what will people at the magazine say about it? Nothing very convincing.
Asked about the article, Mr. Spanfeller said it was an aberration that had “clearly failed” to give the subject the sensitive treatment it deserved.
Three words for you, Mr. Spanfeller, which should tell you that this is not an aberration and is instead a perfect example of the kind of treatment that your managing editor thinks the topic deserves:
“Wife or whore?”