Sep 19, 2024 19:00:00

There is a company that is taking advantage of Forbes' high search rankings to create affiliate articles, earning 500 billion yen a year, and even considering acquiring Forbes.

Forbes, an economic magazine, is generally considered a media outlet that publishes high-quality articles, and it tends to rank highly in Google search results. However, an investigation by Lars Lofgren, who is familiar with the operation of websites, revealed that 'Forbes Marketplace,' which is responsible for some of Forbes' web articles, is taking advantage of Forbes' high

page rank to place a large number of 'low-quality affiliate pages' at the top of Google search results, making a killing, and even considering acquiring the original Forbes.

Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host
https://larslofgren.com/forbes-marketplace/

If you search for 'best cbd gummies' on Google, a Forbes article titled '5 Strongest CBD Gummies Of 2024' will appear at the top of the results.

The article begins with an appeal that 'cannabis gummies can help relieve pain and anxiety' and goes on to introduce five types of 'the strongest cannabis gummies selected by our editors.' The article also includes an advertisement for cannabis gummies with a 25% off coupon.

According to Lofgren, if an article appears at the top of Google search results, it can earn more than $100,000 (about 14 million yen) in advertising revenue per month. Also, because Google does not insert ads on cannabis-related search results pages, it is possible that the click-through rate of Forbes articles is very high.

It seems that in the past, Forbes would never have published articles for affiliate purposes such as 'The 5 Best Cannabis Gummies: 2024 Edition', but in recent years, a large number of similar articles have been created and frequently appear at the top of Google searches. In fact, these affiliate articles were not created by Forbes itself, but by 'Forbes Marketplace', a company separate from Forbes, and the revenue is received by Forbes Marketplace, not Forbes itself.

Forbes Marketplace initially operated as a sub-brand called '

Forbes Advisor ' that featured affiliate articles in the B2B and financial categories of Forbes, but has expanded its business to include sub-brands such as ' Forbes Home Improvement ' that features housing-related articles and ' Forbes Health ' that features health-related articles. The Forbes Advisor privacy policy lists the company name as 'Forbes Marketplace Holdings Limited.'

Below is the trend in traffic numbers for Forbes Advisor. You can see that traffic numbers have increased sharply since 2020.

While investigating the details of Forbes Marketplace, Lofgren discovered the name Forbes Marketplace in a document about stock transactions for Forbes filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The document included information such as 'Forbes has granted Forbes Marketplace the right to use the trademark,' 'Forbes owns 39.53% of Forbes Marketplace's stock,' and 'Forbes has one seat on the board of directors of Forbes Marketplace, and Forbes' largest shareholder also has one seat.'

The same document also states that 'Forbes Marketplace was founded in September 2019' and 'Forbes Marketplace's revenue from January 2021 to September 2021 was $25.4 million (approximately 3.62 billion yen).' Based on the increase in traffic to Forbes Marketplace after the document was submitted, Mr. Lofgren estimates that annual revenue in 2024 will be $300 million to $400 million (approximately 43 billion to 57 billion yen).

Furthermore, as Lofgren continued his investigation, he found the LinkedIn account of Akil Kalra, who served as an executive of Marketplace Platforms Limited, the parent company of Forbes Marketplace. At the time of writing, Kalra's LinkedIn account had been deleted, but it seemed that he had some kind of feud with Marketplace Platforms Limited, and internal information about Marketplace Platforms Limited had been posted as 'screenshots of text messages sent to reporters from major newspapers.'

Below is a screenshot of the post by Mr. Kalra. Mr. Kalra's background and career are written, and at the bottom it says 'Marketplace Platforms Limited plans to acquire Forbes.' In other words, Forbes Marketplace took advantage of Forbes' high page rank to place affiliate articles at the top of Google search results, rapidly growing to earn $300 million to $400 million a year, and accumulating enough wealth to consider acquiring Forbes.

Google considers the act of 'publishing third-party pages without any first-party oversight' to be '

misappropriation of a site's reputation .' Lofgren points out that 'Forbes is just a separate company that holds a small stake in Forbes Marketplace, and we don't believe that Forbes is vetting the articles that Forbes Marketplace creates,' and argues that Forbes Marketplace's actions constitute 'misappropriation of a site's reputation.'

At the end of the article reporting the results of the Forbes Marketplace survey, Lofgren sharply criticized Google, saying, 'I have no ill will toward Forbes Marketplace,' 'The real culprit is Google,' 'Google has decided that Forbes is the authority on everything,' and 'Google's ranking algorithm is out of control.' He concluded by saying, 'We are forced to sift through shit every day.'

Continued

A problem in which a large number of low-quality pages borrowing the names of famous news sites for affiliate purposes were discovered has led to the evil hand being extended to CNN and USA Today - GIGAZINE