Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips has told Press Gazette how the business magazine brand is focusing on its core communities as Google AI Overviews hit traffic.
Visits to Forbes.com were down 59% year on year and 4% month on month in October to 75.4 million visits, according to Similarweb.
This made it the 29th biggest English-language news website in the world, having been 14th in December 2024.
Phillips told Press Gazette’s podcast this meant programmatic advertising “is down” – although other revenue types at Forbes such as live events, branded content and licensing are “pretty steady”.
Overall 2025 has been “stable”, she said. Forbes does not disclose specific financial information.
Phillips attributed the traffic decline to the rollout of Google’s AI Overviews in 2024, providing lengthy answers at the top of many types of search results (especially for evergreen content) meaning users may not feel the need to click through to the original source.
“We’re losing that attribution of, you know, who’s the richest person in the world, according to Forbes, it’s Elon Musk.
“And now that has been bypassed so we are losing that opportunity to serve those ads around that content, which we’ve been known for.”
Instead, Phillips said, the focus is on “coming back to more premium where for a lot of years, many publishers, including ourselves, were making a lot of money off of the mass scale.
“And so now we’re coming back to communities, what Forbes is known for, which is really about championing entrepreneurial success.”
Phillips became chief executive of Forbes in January, and shortly afterwards the company revealed plans to cut up to 5% of its total workforce after missing its financial goals in 2024.
Phillips told staff in a memo, reported by Adweek, they were “reprioritising resources and reorganising some areas to further increase efficiency and laser focus on the core strength of our brand”.
Telling Press Gazette last week about that decision, Phillips said: “I think a lot of publishers were in the same spot, or still are in the same spot. And so for us, it’s getting back to those core communities and those businesses and our editorial journalism that we take pride in and protect. And so how do we look at that in new revenue models?
“And as the business evolves, as the digital ecosystem changes, there were certain parts of the company that were fully just servicing that digital ecosystem, which is now evaporating quite quickly.”
A major area of focus and expansion for Forbes now is its franchises: for example the Forbes 30 Under 30 List, which spun out into a Top Creators list in 2022.
That led to a two-day Forbes Creator Upfronts event held in Los Angeles in October sponsored by Walmart.
Phillips said Forbes was increasingly “gathering those communities that stem from an editorial list, convening the communities around a moment or event and then really socialising that and monetising that socialisation on other platforms so we’re not Google dependent or search dependent”.
Phillips had travelled to London to attend the second annual Forbes CMO Summit Europe.
She said the success of these events “does come back to that connection from editorial… and how that brand resonates and connects the community”.
Forbes events: ‘We were willing to take a bet in a community’
Events have seen a boost for many publishers since the Covid-19 pandemic as they met an appetite for in-person interactions.
But Phillips said Forbes was already “ahead of the curve” with a “pretty robust events business” even before 2020 “because we were willing to either double down or take a bet in a community that was either new or really wanted us to engage”.
She said they are now looking at the events that are working and thinking about how do they “expand thoughtfully and do that with the best partners in the best regions” rather than going too fast and becoming “fractured in too many places”.
Phillips said Forbes is also meeting the appetite for real-life meetings through its members’ only club which launched in Madrid in December last year in partnership with Spain Media, which publishes one of its 43 licensed global editions. The club now has 500 members, she said.
She revealed Forbes has just signed a deal in Dallas, Texas to launch another club “and we’re close in a lot of other regions as well to be doing the same”.
The Forbes print magazine also fits the definition of being smaller but more premium, Phillips said.
“We like to call it the front door to the brand. It still resonates and still means something to be on the cover of Forbes, obviously. We still have incredible leaders on there, and it looks beautiful.
“It’s not going to be something for the future that we’re going to build on, on print, but it is something we do. We’ll always keep a presence in print.”
Digitally, Forbes has just launched an AI-driven dynamic paywall helping to customise messaging around subscribing to individual users – as well as decide when is the most opportune moment to show it to them (for example, after two, three or four articles).
Phillips said it is very early days but that the “conversion rate was really high on mobile”.
She also said they will be looking at the value proposition: “Are there other things included in that price? Do you want either access to events, or do you want newsletters? Or do you want other things that are part of Forbes that can be bundled within that membership?”
Varied pricing levels, free trials and gifting options are also variables that are being considered.
Editorially, Phillips said “the human is interacting with our editorial product at all points” meaning no content is being put out that has been solely produced by AI.
“We are the number one most trusted brand on Linkedin for our editorial content, and we plan to keep it that way.”
Forbes among publishers ‘standing up for themselves’ against AI ‘theft’
Phillips also discussed AI licensing deals: Forbes has only one small deal, with Amazon Alexa for citation in answers to questions like “who’s the richest person in the world?” She said the answer could be something like: “According to Forbes, it’s Elon Musk.”
Forbes does not have other partnerships, Phillips said, because it was concentrating on taking “care of our business first. Do what we do best. Productise what we have, and look for new products in the market, and then, you know, build our data and IP for us so that we can focus on that first and foremost.”
Forbes is blocking the bots via Tollbit and is participating in a lawsuit led by the News/Media Alliance against Canadian AI company Cohere.
Last week the 14 publishers involved celebrated an initial victory as Cohere’s motion to dismiss was rejected in full.
Asked why Forbes wanted to be involved in that case, Phillips said: “There’s going to be winners and losers in this race, but it does feel like a moment where we need relay races and we need to band together with other, you know, whether it’s media partners or just companies in general, to say this kind of isn’t really fair.
“You’re stealing our IP. You’re stealing our artwork. You’re coming into our store and taking what has been ours, and reselling it. And fundamentally, it’s just not okay to do that…
“Honestly, I don’t know if much will come out of it, but I do think it’s at least right for the publishers and the media companies to stand up for themselves, especially the smaller ones,” citing figures that around two to three local newspapers in the US have been shutting each week for years.
“That’s really devastating for some of these small communities.”
Listen to the full interview with Forbes CEO Sherry Phillips on Press Gazette’s Future of Media Explained podcast.
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