MobileBeat 2015: How to grow by adapting to the millennial audience
3Speaker: Mark Howard (Forbes Media)
Moderator: Matt Marshall (VentureBeat)
The millennial audience, or those under age 35, are highly digital - and now make up about 60 percent of Forbes’ smartphone audience. And consumption of mobile news by this generation has exploded. Today, Forbes has 18 million smartphone-only visitors, bigger than Forbes.com’s total audience five years ago. Nearly half of Forbes.com’s traffic comes from a mobile device (40% smartphones, 10% tablet). Notably, 60 percent of it’s traffic comes from people searching on Google or other search engines, and finding Forbes articles organically. Most of the rest is through people typing www.forbes.com directly, or from social channels. In other words, Forbes isn’t spending a lot of money to acquire readers. Rather, it tracks user patterns on desktop, smartphone and tablet, measuring things like consumption time, traffic sources, age and gender, and content themes being consumed — to serve content where and when users want it. Mark Howard, Chief Revenue Officer of Forbes, will also discuss the role of social in the mobile-led world, and mobile web vs. apps business opportunities.