Comment by ghaff 7 hours ago
Forbes as a whole basically sold its soul for clicks. It used to be one of the three top business magazines depending on your preferences. After the web became dominant, at some point after Malcolm Forbes died, you ended up with a ton of blog writers--with plenty of biases and axes to grind--and essentially advertorial content.
For the amount of money involved, and all joking aside, you can have my first and last name. You can name a horrible flesh eating disease after me. It doesn't matter.
I get the feeling the family doesn't care while they lounge around on their stacks of cash?
If they really care about it they can just change their name though.
Bit of a microcosm of the entire business world nowadays. Forbes made something - a magazine that produced enough good content to gain a reputation. In the new school of business, that's an asset, and assets are things we turn into cash as quickly as possible, so now Forbes sells CBD, and now anyone who sees "forbes.com" in the URL knows it's useless crap, but hey, someone made some money, and now they can go find the next thing to flip for a couple bucks.
Well what did you expect them to do? Magazine subscriptions fell off a cliff as the Internet matured and no one wants to pay for online content.
fortune.com too. same thing . these brands realized they can cash in on their domain authority to create content farms full of ads. scales really well too
Fortune's case was mostly the whole Time-Life magazine empire going to the dogs partly by way of TWB. Forbes just kind of faded away post-Malcolm (and with a distracted Steven Forbes).
But, in general, the magazine and journalism businesses aren't what they were so most of the relatively mass market magazines pretty much cashed in on their brands to the degree their owners decided to keep them around.
It's a really good example of why one should not name your company after your surname. At some point if you sell your company, you are putting the surname of all your descendants in the hands of some other entity outside of your/their direct control.