Like ‘paragliding’ off a cliff: Forbes Australia’s editor-in-chief on the publication’s journey so far
Six months after Forbes’s launch down under, its first editor-in-chief, Sarah O’Carroll, has compared the publication’s journey so far to “paragliding” off a cliff. “You run, and you jump off,” she said, “but as soon as you lift off, you have to learn how to fly.”
Boasting a 264% month-on-month increase in page views on forbes.com.au alone since launch, Forbes Australia now has 35 employees across editorial, sales, marketing and operations. O’Carroll was appointed in February last year, seven months before the company officially opened for business in September.
O’Carroll at Forbes Australia Women’s Summit 2023
Reflecting on where Forbes Australia sits in the local business publication market now, O’Carroll said Forbes is very much owning the entrepreneurial innovation space.
“To be honest, I don’t really look at competitors. I look at our readers, and I look at our customers, ” she told Mumbrella. “I’m not comparing ourselves to the AFR [The Australian Financial Review], or The Australian or other business papers. There’s crossover, but we’re different beats.”
O’Carroll explained that instead of looking at purely demographic statistics, the motivation of readers and customers is an equally, if not more important metric to her.
“People who are ambitious, who have the drive, and who are looking for inspiration and ideas on where to invest – those are the connections between all of our core audiences.”
Apart from the better-known product which is the bi-monthly Forbes magazine, the company also operates forbes.com.au which has a membership subscription model, a weekly newsletter that will soon ramp up its frequency, social channels and in-person events.
The latest issue of the magazine, which unveiled Forbes Australia’s Richest 50 List, featured the likes of mining magnate Gina Rinehart and Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes on the cover.
Issue three of Forbes Australia
While they are indicative of Forbes’ interest in subjects higher up in the business food chain, O’Carroll said the list is more than just a compilation of the country’s richest people.
“It also does a snapshot in time of what are the leading industries and where the economic power is in the country at the time,” she said. “Over the years as we track it, you can see how that list is changing.”
She also highlighted that the content is not always about billionaires and C-suites alike. What pinpoints Forbes’ content, she said, is “the same drive behind entrepreneurial capitalism”, and sometimes that come from fresh faces in the business world.
“I don’t think if you picked up the magazine as a new business owner, you would feel alienated by the content or by seeing the Rich List.”
On another note, Forbes was not O’Carroll’s first rodeo in localising a global brand for the Australian audience.
Prior to this, she spent close to four years at Yahoo Finance with the same editor-in-chief title and was tasked with relaunching the brand in Australia. She carried an impressive track record of boosting Yahoo Finance’s monthly readers from two to three thousand to 2.4 million at peak.
On the parallels and differences between the two gigs, O’Carroll said it was very much “the dynamics of a startup versus walking in with all the computers plugged in”.
“I relaunched Yahoo, but I went straight into a very established, huge team in Yahoo Australia,” she said. “Here at Forbes, we started from scratch … it was from building the tech stack to hiring the whole team, from getting an office to buying the computers, the whole shebang. This is a lot more gruelling.”
“The focus [at Yahoo] was very much on the content, whereas here is on the overall Forbes experience of worlds that we’re building.”
Looking out to the rest of 2023, O’Carroll had a mixture of goals, which include having a few more events, lists and magazines under the publication’s belt. However, one thing will rise above all.
“The days of: launch the website, stick up some stories and hope for the best is long gone,” she said.
“I want to see that we have built a strong community of business leaders across different groups who could really feel that they belong, and feel that they have been informed and inspired by the stories and the journalism that we’re creating.”
Issue four of Forbes Australia magazine will launch on 20 April. The magazine’s current commercial partners include NAB Private Wealth, Amex, McLaren, Rolex, Range Rover, Silversea, Hublot and Hardy Bros.
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Darcy Song was a reporter at Mumbrella, covering media owners, adtech and social platforms. She left in October 2023.
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The art of interviews without substance. There’s nothing new about Forbes AU in this article. Feels like they needed a bit of PR to boost their visibility but don’t have much to talk about apart for that broken readership statistic. What’s the base figure the 264% increase is calculated from? I can also build a website and go from 10 to 26 page views and I’ll have my 260% page views increase. The fact you’re not giving real audience figures actually feels like you don’t have much to show for it.
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