Customer Insight
Forbes.com: Digital Dominance
Everyone knows Forbes magazine as a leader in the field of business information. Forbes is the benchmark, surpassing its nearest competitors in ad pages and revenue consistently. Forbes defines necessary reading for the business community. But did you know that Forbes.com has one of the largest online newsrooms of any traditional business news outlet, with hundreds of writers and reporters, or that every day Forbes.com and its affiliated websites publish over 4,000 articles and produce an average of 15 videos for the web? Forbes.com is the place to go for journalism in the Forbes tradition: Predictive, provocative, precise, contrarian, with strong opinions backed by facts, delivered with all the immediacy, depth and interactivity that the web allows.
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"Forbes.com content is accessible whenever, wherever and however consumers want their information." |
When Forbes.com decided to rebuild the infrastructure of its online presence, it turned to AT&T. Stable and secure are common assumptions of a web hosting provider, but AT&T's Enterprise Hosting delivers to a most uncommon extreme. To quote Michael Smith, SVP and General Manager of Operations, Forbes.com, "With AT&T hosting our operation, there has never been a hiccup, not a single time, a remarkable performance of bullet-proof reliability." Recent research by online monitoring service Pingdom proves that this performance is no fluke.
Pingdom found that out of 13 top news sites, only Forbes.com had zero downtime in the first half of 2008. Not four hours, seemingly the norm among its competitors, or worse, double-digit hour counts, but absolutely no downtime at all over the six months measured. Smith continues, "I can absolutely say that AT&T has helped optimize our existing assets, maximize the potential of our site and provide us with exactly what we set out to achieve. From a business perspective, the increased performance encourages viewers to visit more pages, read more stories, use more tools and see more of our advertisers' brands."
Communities, Videos and More
Forbes Digital encompasses Forbes.com, ForbesAutos.com, ForbesTraveler.com, Clipmarks.com, Investopedia.com, RealClearPolitics.com and the Forbes.com Business and Finance Blog Network. Collectively, it reaches 37 million unique visitors worldwide on a monthly basis. Forbes.com content is accessible whenever, wherever and however consumers want their information, via RSS desktop feeds, mobile updates, video, widgets, blogs and email newsletters. Smith describes the following: "There is no question that we portray the synergies of a 90-plus year old magazine that is without question best in class. It is an important part of our DNA. Yet only 1% of the web content is from the magazine. The website is not merely an extension of the magazine; it is the home of the best real-time business data available, the largest producer of business video online and houses the most robust collection of community networks of any business-oriented website." Forbes.com supports specialty blogging communities catering to business leaders, entrepreneurs and consumers, and the Forbes.com Video Network is the leading source of original business video programming on the web, with market and business news updates throughout the day along with select lifestyle programming.
So how does Forbes.com get all this information into the hands of the end users? AT&T complements its web hosting with Intelligent Content Distribution Service. With all of Forbes.com's offerings stored on the AT&T network of service nodes, delivery is seamless and immediate. An entrepreneur in the U.K. can view informational video from a source point in London, and a CIO in Florida can post to the CIO network while connected to the network essentially in-state. Smith explains it best: "With the content closer to the edge of the network and therefore closer to the browser, performance speed is improved, as is scalability to handle traffic surges."
Mobile Innovations
Some of these surges come from the release of "The Lists" that Forbes is famous for publishing. Curiosity about the top-earning dead celebrities or the newest additions to the world's billionaires list generates huge interest. With the release of new lists, Forbes.com becomes inundated with traffic, so having the data on the AT&T infrastructure enables Forbes.com to focus on content development. While those famous lists are a nod in the direction of tradition and brand continuity, the evolving product line and the enormity of data, particularly in video form, also necessitate a content distribution service. Forbes.com is aggressively pursuing a strategy to secure a bigger share of the mobile device information market, another high-traffic, high-volume concern. Employing portable-specific video production and deploying filtering techniques to specifically target information and advertising, Forbes.com is not simply replicating the website on a mobile platform, but rather treating mobility as another opportunity to reach customers and offer its unique services.
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Forbes Digital by the Numbers
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