Forbes Media exploring sale

Roger Yu | USA TODAY

Forbes Media, controlled by former Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, is up for sale.

In a memo sent to employees Friday, CEO Mike Perlis said Forbes has received indications of interest from investors for the company, which includes Forbes magazine and Forbes.com.

"The frequency and serious nature of these overtures have brought us to a decision point," he wrote. "We have hired Deutsche Bank to represent us, and we expect interest from numerous suitors."

The company is looking to sell for about $400 million, according to a report by Bloomberg News.The Forbes family still controls the company after selling a 45% stake to investment firm Elevation Partners in 2006.

The magazine, founded in 1917 by business columnist B.C. Forbes, has been focusing heavily on the digital side of its editorial operations to make up for the sluggishness in print ad sales, a widespread problem for print publications in the digital era.

"Digital revenues are expected to increase over 25% by the end of the year," Perlis wrote. "Our efforts have also focused on diversifying our revenue streams to complement our advertising-based businesses — and many of our initiatives have come to fruition this year."

Perlis was hired three years ago to chart a new course for Forbes, which previously had relied mostly on the magazine for revenue. In an effort to boost digital ad sales, Forbes acquired True/Slant, a publishing software platform that eventually transformed how Forbes.com operates.

Using the software, Forbes.com not only publishes stories from staffers but also from a network of 1,200 contributors, many of them unpaid. In an early experiment in native advertising — advertising that resembles the look and feel of a publication's editorial content — Forbes also began selling access to the publishing platform, allowing corporate sponsors to post their own material on Forbes.com.

With a flood of material available, Forbes.com's traffic grew from about 12 million unique monthly visitors in 2010 to about 26 million, the company says, citing ComScore data.

Digital advertising surpassed print ads sales for the first time this year and now makes up about 55% of total advertising revenue.

In a profile of Perlis in The New York Times earlier this week, a Forbes spokeswoman said that advertising revenue for Forbes.com would grow by 35% from 2010 to 2013.

In the first nine months of the year, Forbes' print ad sales fell 7.5% from a year ago to $165.7 million, according to Publishers Information Bureau.

To diversify the revenue base, Perlis has expanded the company's conference business and begun licensing the brand name to office buildings. The publishing software is also licensed to publishers that want to replicate the contributor-submission model of content creation.