Forbes is creating a wine-focused content vertical, commerce site and membership program to grow direct consumer revenue beyond its traffic-dependent businesses, as it looks to offset zero-click traffic declines and content discovery challenges.
There’s a sense of urgency to the strategy. In Q1 2026, Forbes’ site traffic was down 37 percent year over year, according to Emily Jackson, svp of revenue and consumer growth at Forbes.
Forbes — and a wide range of publishers in the same boat — have to determine how to bring value to their existing, smaller audiences, and how to more effectively make money from them.
“We don’t have as much scale as we used to,” Jackson said. “Because of a lot of the changes that we’re seeing to traffic, to the way that people are discovering content, and to monetization, we feel really strongly about building direct audiences… We are really trying to focus on what a net new business is that we can build that will be durable in this age of AI.”
Despite the sharp dip in traffic, revenue was up 2 percent year over year in Q1, according to Jackson. A big part of that is a significant increase in conversion rate — up 100 percent year over year, she added.
Forbes’ strategy has been to invest more heavily in original Forbes content (such as “well-researched and reported interviews with CEOs about products fueling their success”) and audience engagement, Jackson said. A new, dedicated audience and loyalty team is working with Forbes’ customer data platform to target and segment audiences and serve them content they are more likely to engage with (such as brand-specific sales during Black Friday), she added. Forbes also has an affiliate business around its product review site, Forbes Vetted.
Forbes saw positive engagement and traffic data from its wine coverage in its lifestyle section (though execs didn’t provide specifics), and saw an opportunity to create a new business around the vertical.
A waitlist to join Forbes’ wine club opens this week. The club, shop and vertical will officially go live in June and roll out this summer with original content and analysis, as well as wine ratings and reviews. Forbes plans to add a registration wall to the vertical, and eventually a digital subscription product tied to the wine rankings. The vertical will also be ad-supported.
Forbes Wine Club members will get a curated box of 12 bottles every quarter, as well as the option to get two bonus holiday shipments (in the summer and winter). Wine shipments will come with tasting notes and stories behind the wine selections. They will also get perks like members-only events, early access to special bottles in the commerce shop, discounts and an annual gift. Forbes’ commerce shop will also allow non-members to buy wine. Forbes is working with e-commerce platform Drinks to help run the wine inventory and fulfillment.
The pricing for the subscription and wine club have not been determined yet, Jackson said.
Other publishers like The Wall Street Journal and Eater offer their own wine clubs, ranging from about $70-$150 per shipment, depending on how many bottles are included. And this isn’t Forbes’ first time getting into the wine business. The publisher had previous partnership deals to sell wine in 2022 and 2013.
Jackson said Forbes’ wine vertical is unique because it focuses on stories about innovation, leadership, entrepreneurship and sustainability, as well as the strength of its curation.
Forbes has hired Clive Pursehouse, a former editor at Decanter, as executive editor of Forbes Wine. Stevie Stacionis, a sommelier, was named Forbes Wine Club Curator. They will work with Cory Baldwin, vp of Forbes Wine to lead the initiative. Forbes will also hire freelancers to cover wine in different regions.
This move is less about Forbes becoming a retailer and more about licensing its brand and selling its curation and editorial judgement, said Michael Cohen, evp of performance media at independent media agency Horizon Media.
“Publishers are effectively sharpening their focus. They’ve shifted from a volume monetization model to a yield monetization approach there,” Cohen said.
However, he noted that it can be challenging for publishers to sustain affiliate businesses when traffic and organic reach are diminishing. While less traffic often means higher-intent audiences are coming to a publisher’s site — which helps improve conversions — Cohen said he wondered about the long-term sustainability of these initiatives, particularly the cost of acquiring new subscribers.
Developing direct reader revenue businesses like subscriptions and memberships was a hot topic at the Digiday Publishing Summit last month, where execs discussed the pressure they were under to grow or build those revenue lines amid traffic declines. There, execs also raised concerns about how difficult it was to scale subscription and membership businesses.
“It’s a prudent, if limited, move for a subset of publishers who would need both reach and some threshold of authority in a given space,” Cohen said. “If it isn’t robust, at least it gets you time to figure out what the next thing looks like, as they figure out what the next moves are.”
Jackson said Forbes teams are discussing ways to add to the company’s affiliate and commerce offerings, in addition to Forbes Vetted and Forbes Wine. There are two considerations Forbes is taking into account: what is endemic to the Forbes brand, and what adds value to their readers, she said.
“If we can continue to hit those two nails on the head, then I definitely see a world in which we would do more in this space,” Jackson said.