How much does it cost to get featured in Forbes?

The short answer

Forbes is not one product. What you pay depends on which door you use, and each door gives you something different. This table is the whole guide in one view; the sections below explain each row.

Route 1: staff editorial coverage

This is what most people picture when they say “featured in Forbes”: a Forbes journalist decides your story is worth telling and writes it. It costs nothing and it carries the most weight, because nobody paid for it.

It is also the least predictable route. Journalists cover stories, not people, so you need news, data or an angle that fits a beat they already write. Expect to pitch for months, and expect most pitches to go unanswered. You will not see the article before it runs, and you have no say in what it says.

If you want to try, our guide to getting featured in a magazine covers how to pitch an editor so the email actually gets read.

Route 2: contributor articles

Forbes publishes a large volume of work by contributors: independent writers with a Forbes byline who cover a specific subject. A contributor may quote you, profile you or build a piece around your company if you are useful to their story.

There is no fee, but there is also no way to buy it. Be very wary of anyone offering to sell you a contributor article. That arrangement is exactly what publishers’ contributor rules are written to prevent, and pieces placed that way can be taken down when they are found, sometimes along with the contributor.

Route 3: Forbes Councils

Forbes Councils is a set of invitation-and-application membership communities (Business Council, Technology Council, Agency Council and others). It is run by The Community Company under a licence from Forbes Media, which matters: it is not Forbes editorial.

Membership lets you publish your own articles in the councils section of forbes.com and contribute quotes to expert panels. Published reviews put the standard plan at about $2,500–$2,700 a year plus a one-time initiation fee of around $600, so roughly $3,100–$3,300 in the first year, with a premium tier around $6,400–$6,800 a year that includes help writing the articles.

• What it is good for: a steady stream of bylined thought-leadership pieces on a recognised domain.
• What it is not: a feature written about you by Forbes. Readers and search engines see a councils post under your own byline.
• Worth knowing: you have to be accepted, you still have to write (or pay extra for help), and the cost recurs every year.

Route 4: BrandVoice

BrandVoice is Forbes’s paid content programme. Your company pays Forbes’s commercial team, and the content runs on forbes.com clearly labelled as BrandVoice. It is advertising, priced like advertising: published estimates start at about $50,000 for a programme.

For a large brand with a content budget, it is a legitimate, transparent way to put material in front of Forbes readers. For a founder who wants one piece of credible coverage, it is usually the wrong tool at the wrong price.

What the $990–$15,000 vendors are actually selling

Search for this question and most of page one is vendors offering a “guaranteed Forbes feature” for a flat fee, often somewhere between $990 and $1,500, with some agencies charging up to $15,000 for a single piece. None of them can sell you staff editorial. So a guaranteed Forbes offer is one of three things:

1. A councils or contributor route. Genuine forbes.com, with the limits and risks described above.
2. Labelled sponsored content. Genuine and legitimate, provided the label is on the page.
3. A different website. A regional edition, a licensed international site, or a lookalike domain with a similar name. Useful to someone, but not what the buyer thinks they bought.

How to tell a real placement from a lookalike

• Read the domain character by character. forbes.com is not forbes-something.com, and a country edition is a different publication with its own audience.
• Check the byline and the section. Staff, contributor, councils and BrandVoice pages each look different and say which they are.
• Look for the label. Paid content has to be clearly identifiable as advertising. That is the Federal Trade Commission’s standard for native ads, and reputable publishers follow it.
• Search for it. Put the exact headline in quotes into Google. If the page is not indexed a week after publication, few people will ever find it.
• Describe it accurately afterwards. “Featured in Forbes” implies an editor chose you. For a councils post or a sponsored piece, say what it is. It protects you, and it is what the FTC’s rules on clear disclosure expect.

Is Forbes actually what you need?

Start from the job the coverage has to do. For most founders and professionals it is one of three:

• Credibility when someone searches your name. Investors, clients and candidates look you up before they reply.
• Proof you can show. A link in a pitch deck, a sales email or your website’s “as featured in” strip.
• Authority over time. Being seen as the person who knows the subject.

Only the third really needs a household-name masthead, and even then consistency beats one big logo. For the first two, what matters is a well-written, accurately labelled feature on a relevant business publication, built so it ranks on your name. That costs a fraction of the Forbes routes and arrives in days, not months.

The alternative: a guaranteed feature that ranks

This is what we sell, so read it with that in mind. A Blue Leopard feature is written by our editorial team from a ten-minute brief, approved by you word for word, and published on the core publication in our network that fits your market. It goes live within 24 hours of your approval, clearly labelled as sponsored, or you get your money back.

Every feature is built to be found: your name in the headline, the URL and the first paragraph, NewsArticle and Person structured data, a profile page on the publication, and same-day submission to Google. We check where it ranks at day 7 and day 30 and send you the data. A single feature is $197; three features on three titles are $597.

If Forbes specifically is the goal, we can quote placements on Forbes and other major outlets through our extended network. Those are priced per outlet, take longer, and the exact terms, including what is guaranteed, are confirmed in writing before you pay.