Forbes launches dynamic AI paywall as it ramps up post-search commercial diversification plans

Last month, the publisher revealed at Digiday’s Publishing Summit Europe that it saw a 40 percent decline this year in search referral traffic. But it is already moving past that, gleaning useful insights from ChatGPT prompts to create new audience cohorts.

“Our top priority over the next 18 months is building and aligning products for [an] off-search [future],” said Philips. “So [that involves] how to get all our products aligned and optimized for this next evolution of media.”

Digiday spoke to Philips while she was in London attending Forbes’ CMO Summit on Nov. 4, where she said AI dominated the event. “But what keeps coming back, even just in the past five months, from our CMOs and other C-suites and communities of ours, is that humanity has to keep driving creativity…we’re all leaning into it [AI] in a way that we find useful and helpful for our businesses…without hurting our editorial integrity or sacrificing our journalism and brand,” she said. 

In the latest installment of Digiday’s Inside the publisher C-Suite series, Philips spoke about how Forbes’ AI-era playbook will mix using AI to drive paid subscriptions, multi-format sponsorships and developing — and protecting — creator-led IP. 

Forbes’ subscriptions play 

Paid subscriptions have typically been the smallest part of Forbes’ revenue mix. Being privately owned, the publisher doesn’t break out its revenue earnings, but currently print and digital subscriptions account for 9 percent of its commercial revenue. (E-commerce accounts for 14 percent, live events 15 percent, licensing 22 percent, with 40 percent integrated media, which covers everything from direct and indirect digital advertising, print, branded content, and insights, per the publisher.)

Forbes subscription prices vary by plan: $9.99 for monthly digital access to its magazine and digital newsletters; $74.99 for yearly access. Annual access to both digital and magazine is $94.99 for the first year, according to Forbes.

Subscriptions are moving to the center of more traditionally free-to-access publisher revenue strategies as they look to reduce future reliance on open-web digital advertising, as zero-click search eats into programmatic revenue. But converting readers isn’t easy when willingness to pay for digital subscriptions has stagnated, per the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report.

For Forbes, the AI-powered dynamic paywall may be what helps it unlock new paying subscribers who have previously been difficult to reach. The paywall, which learns from reader behavior, adjusts in real time to show the right subscription offer to the right person at the right moment, instead of everyone getting the same “subscribe now” message.

For instance, if a person clicked on a Forbes story about small-business tax strategy, the AI will notice if they’re a repeat visitor on that topic, that they’ve read the business-finance stories all the way to the end, and linger on expert-driven content. So instead of showing a hard paywall immediately, Forbes will let you read a second story before sensing a subscription discount offer. It is tailored to a time when they’re more likely to say yes. 

Likewise, it can spot when a reader is a casual visitor who’s come to a Forbes article from social media, and when it’s a high-intent regular reader, so it can suggest different messages to both that are relevant to each individual’s browsing habits. 

Its new paywall insights are just a week old, but the early numbers show promise, per Philips. Forbes has struggled to get readers to convert on mobile devices. But since the dynamic paywall launched, mobile conversions have surged 400 percent. Its desktop conversions have been 174% higher, per the publisher. 

As a result, Forbes has calculated that this has increased the lifetime value of its average subscriber by 119 percent on desktop and 325 percent on mobile. 

Forbes declined to share its subscriber or member numbers, but it has seen a 30 percent year-over-year bump in subscribers this year. The costs of getting new paying subscribers in the door (common acquisition tactics like marketing and promotion costs or discounts and introductory offers) are also down 13 percent, per the publisher. 

It’s not the first publisher to use AI to help offset challenges, ironically, partly driven by AI. The Financial Times has been running its AI-powered paywall for nearly a year. It has a revamped model coming early next year that will plug directly into the current paywall, using patterns from longtime subscribers to inform acquisition efforts. 

Since the paywall launched in January, the FT has seen conversion rates jump 290% and lifetime value rise between 7% and 10% among the audience segments exposed to the AI-driven system.

Expanding creator-led IP – and protecting it from AI scraping

Pure digital and programmatic revenue is getting tougher to hold onto, so the bigger opportunity for Forbes is in sponsorships, noted Philips. Brands still want access to their audiences — just in more integrated ways. That means sponsorship packages that blend live events with social extensions and co-branded editorial across platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube and Snapchat, she said. 

I think within a year to 18 months, that business [open-web display advertising] will be a pretty small piece of our pie,” said Philips. 

In the summer, Forbes launched its AI and Strategic Platforms Group, created to identify, build, and scale the next generation of revenue streams for the company. Philips described the group as a startup incubation hub within Forbes. Kyle Vinansky (formerly Forbes’ global svp of sales leads it, and part of his remit is to find new ways of leveraging AI to accelerate business growth.

One of its latest insights is the potential to move its strongest commerce creators and influencers onto more traditional distribution channels, such as social — and crucially, outside the search ecosystem, stressed Philips. 

She pointed to the latest product to come out of its product review and recommendation hub Forbes Vetted, as an example of the kind of new revenue model that has the potential to take a far bigger slice of its revenue pie. On 6. Nov. Forbes Vetted launched a video podcast “Forbes Talk Show. on YouTube” The show features influencers, entrepreneurs and innovators sharing the products, tools and rituals they use which help them to be successful. 

“That’s an example of where we’re heading in this direction.” This part has an e-commerce tie – but we’ll be using that model to sell what we used to sell before, which was more of a [traditional] sponsorship model in B2B,” she said.

Philips said the shift is already obvious in their own business. At Forbes’ creator Upfront in LA last week, sponsored by Walmart, it was clear that big retailers like Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart and Wayfair are now doing major deals with publishers because creators are moving real products for them, stressed Philips. “It reflects an interesting shift in what’s happening in the broader ecosystem,” she added, where the traditional lines between publishers, creators and retail marketing are blurring fast.

Brian Wieser, CEO and principal of Madison and Wall recently stressed to Digiday just how critical it will be for publishers to find ways to protect their brand and IP from AI models replicating or imitating them without permission. 

Philips acknowledged that protecting their IP is already an active issue, but that the horse has partly left the barn. Some of the biggest tech companies have openly told them they already use Forbes’ ranking data, especially for lists of top creators and influencers, inside their own models and products.

But her view is that the strength of the Forbes brand still carries real value. The focus now is on finding new ways to monetize and extend that IP — not just relying on a single digital list, but turning those rankings into multiple formats, products and revenue opportunities so Forbes captures more of the downstream value, even as AI models ingest their data.

Forbes has a couple of small AI licensing deals, one of which is with Amazon Alexa+, which is readying a 2.0 version. But AI licensing is not an area Philips is bullish on expanding. 

“It felt like it was [important] in a moment, and we kind of switched course on it, because what we really wanted to focus on was the building of new products and platforms and focusing on trying to protect our IP as much as possible. So that’s where we’re at right now,” she added.