What you need to know:

• Forbes Australia launched in October last year, led by a print magazine which has quickly diversified into digital publishing, events, forums and clubs.
• It's less hard journalism, more storytelling around inspiration, leadership, innovation and "entrepreneurial capitalism" that establishment business media deems too soft or non-core.
• Now with a digital audience of 300,000 and growing at a triple digit clip each month, per Editor-in-Chief Sarah O'Carroll, Forbes Australia will double it's business in the next year - likely upwards of $20m.
• NAB Private Wealth, McLaren, American Express, Rolex and Range Rover are early commercial partners.
• At the top of the pyramid is the Forbes Club, an elite network of individuals paying tens of thousands annually to talk to each other.       

Less hard news, hard angles

Like Nine’s former publishing boss Chris Janz and his yet-to-launch Shearwater Capital-backed Scire Media, Forbes Australia’s arrival seven months ago is, so far, looking like a winner. It's tapping a rich vein of interest in coverage of business and entrepreneurs that’s less enamoured with hard news and hard angles.

Former News Corp and Yahoo Finance journalist, Sarah O’Carroll, is Forbes first local Editor-in-Chief. She started with a team of three before launch. Just over a year on from hatching a plan to tap a different business audience, Forbes is now at 35 people and growing. 

Forbes Australia is structured under a license deal with the Australian entrepreneur Michael Lane, who spent 20 years at Success Resources running business events and global tours for the likes of success speaker Tony Robbins and business identities Richard Branson and Gary Vaynerchuk. It’s the stuff that business mastheads eschew for harder reporting and under-the-hood punchy angles. And that, per O’Carroll, is precisely why Forbes has taken off here. 

“There are a lot of business publications, mainstream business publications," he says hat-tipping the AFR and The Australian. "But really, in terms of a business publication that focuses on entrepreneurs, innovation and entrepreneurial capitalism, there was really a niche for that space,” she says. “There’s a whole group of people who would not necessarily be reading traditional media, traditional business publications, and who really, from what we can see since we've launched, are looking for something like Forbes.”

Clubs and communities

Before Forbes Australia landed, the US masthead claimed an eye-popping 2.4 million unique Australian users to its American online publishing venture; O’Carroll says locally its digital audience is upwards of 300,000 users per month and growing fast. 

Between its magazine (15,000 print run), online publishing, events and another eye-popping number – the Forbes Club in which individuals pay tens of thousands for an elite series of forums and networking fives times a year – Australian revenues in the first year are estimated at upwards of $10m. 

O’Carroll would not comment on the figure although indicated Forbes Australia would double its business in the next 12 months. 

“When you're looking through traditional business media, you probably have to sift through a lot of stories that would not have been relevant to our audience. And to get to the stories of innovation, entrepreneurship ... I guess they have to sift through a lot of stuff to get to the one story that's of interest of them.”

O’Carroll cited a recent lunch conversation with a company boss who now has Forbes Australia magazine sitting at his bedside along with The Economist and a handful of other business publications that keep him up to speed. As O’Carroll recounts one of his lunch lines: “If he ever wanted to leave his current business and go out on his own, it gives him that inspiration of where the trends are and what's actually happening in the world. Rather than a lot of doom and gloom in the other publications.”

Missing links

It's a common theme. Journalism at its historical best uncovers the covered – but often it’s uncomfortable and negative. O’Carroll and Forbes is more feel-good inspiration around innovation and leadership. And whether hardened editors and journalists like it or not, there’s an underbelly of demand for it. It's why motivational speakers like Tony Robbins get rich and famous.         

“There’s a real need for that storytelling,” she says “If we look at the year just prior to when we launched, there was about 600 VC deals done in Australia. Only some of those stories are told. You might just get the series, a headline of what the funding is and there's a quick synopsis. But really in my mind, there's like four or five stories in that one story," says O'Carroll. "The stories of the founders, there are stories in the deal, there's the stories of the trend. Traditionally, if you look at the majority of funding in the years prior to our launch, before the VC turn down, it went to fintech. But there's growing interest in biotech and cleantech and in people who are actually coming up with ideas to solve some of the biggest problems facing the planet, the world. And it's not just all about climate change, it's even mental health, how businesses are run, changing cities, how the workforce has changed and digitisation," she adds.

Innovation untold

“There's so much innovation in Australia and those stories are not really being told.”

In seven months Forbes has launched a magazine, a slate of high-profile events, forums, clubs and newsletters and a swag of new initiatives are coming, including more content sharing from Forbes editions abroad and getting into the under 30s set. 

NAB Private Wealth, McLaren, American Express, Rolex and Range Rover are among the early line-up of advertisers and partners. “Rolex took the outside back cover for the year, straight away,” she says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

For the coming 12 months, O’Carroll says a hectic rollout of new products and initiatives are in play although not all land with a winning thump. The Women’s Summit pulled circa 1600 delegates and was a cracking success, says O’Carroll, but Forbes pulled its Future of Wealth Summit two weeks after launching it. “We were selling tickets, we had a great line-up of speakers but we didn’t nail the timing,” she says. A Business Summit is set for October.” 

“I really want to build communities around our core niche audiences and that's through content, in person events, the clubs and forums, and really deliver that storytelling around innovation and entrepreneurial capitalism that they're not getting,” she says. 

Next year’s numbers will tell the story. As fancied digital media pureplays like Vice and BuzzFeed falter – the digerati for a decade revelled in predictions of media’s emancipation from legacy players – it might be that an old stalwart has found a new way to kick on.