Looks like Forbes is at least testing things, whether people might like these approaches or not. Native content is a very fine editorial line to walk in terms

Looks like Forbes is at least testing things, whether people might like these approaches or not. Native content is a very fine editorial line to walk in terms of how it is identified. But if people are clicking the link from a share on social, odds are that any sort of story label on the actual Forbes site is not going to show up in the share, and thus they can pass it off as real content even though it is paid for. Once they get the click or share on a native story, they don't care. The registration piece is also interesting. From a monetization standpoint, they can then email the crap out of those people (including pushing native email ads that they likely bill on a CPM rate for). Logged-in users also give Forbes another interesting monetization option in the form of cookie onboarding services like LiveRamp[1] and such. You can get a CPM rate for simply linking logged-in users to the cookie onboarder's platform which they then match against cookies from advertisers to help them "retag" people for retargeting purposes that may have deleted past cookies, or jumped across devices. Cookie onboarding gets interesting because from a user standpoint, the impact is perhaps a very slightly increased load time (loading the onboarding tag), and ads that have more accurate targeting. But in theory this allows publishers to offer content that is "ad free" because the user is paying for it in the form of data. A lot of mobile providers include this as well which is annoying because it is harder to detect and block, and they sure as crap don't disclose it. Not making a statement on whether these developments are good or bad, rather just commenting on the interesting nature of them. [1] http://liveramp.com/blog/a-primer-on-data-onboarding/ http://liveramp.com/blog/a-primer-on-data-onboarding/