Forbes BrandVoice explained: what it costs and how it differs from editorial

The short answer

Forbes BrandVoice is a paid programme run by Forbes. An advertiser gets its own section of forbes.com and publishes articles there, written by its own people or produced with Forbes's in-house studio. Each page is labelled "BrandVoice | Paid Program" and the byline reads "Brand Contributor". Forbes does not publish prices; the most cited figures are $50,000 to $75,000 a month, from trade reports in 2013 and 2014, with a three-month minimum.

If what you actually need is one credible, well-written article about your company that customers and investors find when they search for it, BrandVoice is a large tool for a small job. Our business publicity service writes a company feature and publishes it on one of the publications we work with, from $249. Forbes is not one of them, and we say so plainly.

What BrandVoice is, and where it came from

Forbes opened its pages to advertiser content in 2010 under the name AdVoice. In October 2012 Digiday reported that, two years after launch, Forbes had renamed the product BrandVoice "to differentiate it as content marketing", had 18 brands on it, including SAP, NetApp, Oracle and UPS, and employed a team of six to help advertisers produce content. Forbes's chief revenue officer described it then as "content from brands, not editors".

The programme grew into a large business. Nieman Lab, reporting in January 2014 on the financial documents shown to potential buyers of Forbes, said BrandVoice accounted for some 20 to 25 percent of the company's ad revenue and brought in $25 million in 2012. Today Forbes's Content & Design Studio calls BrandVoice its "flagship offering" and says it has been running "for more than a decade".

How it works in practice

• The brand gets a hub. Each advertiser has its own section on forbes.com, for example forbes.com/sites/sap/ for SAP, headed "SAP BrandVoice" with the words "Paid Program" beside it.
• The brand's people write. Posts carry the byline "Brand Contributor". Forbes's studio can produce content for brands that do not have writers, and brands can republish material of their own.
• Forbes sells it as advertising. Forbes's editorial standards page lists BrandVoice under "Affiliate, Branded, Partner & Sponsored Content", alongside Councils, Forbes Advisor and Forbes Vetted, separate from its journalism.
• Promotion is part of the price. The 2013 report on site licences said the price depended on the level of promotion and syndication bought with it.

What Forbes BrandVoice costs

Forbes does not publish a BrandVoice rate card, and its studio page asks interested brands to get in touch. Every public figure comes from trade press reporting on deals at the time. They are old, but they are consistent, and they tell you the scale you are dealing with:

Put as totals, the 2013 minimum term was $150,000 to $225,000 (three months at $50,000 to $75,000), and the 2016 premium tier was at least $600,000 (six months at $100,000). That is simple arithmetic on the reported figures, not a quote. Prices today may be higher or lower, packages change, and Forbes's sales team will price your campaign on its own terms.

How BrandVoice differs from Forbes editorial

The difference is who pays and who decides. Forbes's editorial values and standards page says Forbes prohibits all staff members and contributors "from accepting compensation, privileges or favors of any kind" from the people, companies or groups featured in their coverage, and that breaches can lead to removal from the platform. Editorial coverage, in other words, cannot be bought. BrandVoice exists so that brands can pay for space without breaking that rule: the content is clearly the brand's own.

There are four main kinds of page on forbes.com, and readers who check, such as journalists, investors and Wikipedia editors, can tell them apart:

Wikipedia's list of perennial sources says most articles on forbes.com are written by non-staff authors, names Brand Contributors among them, and says such articles should be treated as self-published and never used for third-party claims about living people. So a BrandVoice article will not help a company or a founder meet Wikipedia's notability bar, and it does not count as independent coverage anywhere that checks.

How to tell a BrandVoice page from editorial

Forbes labels BrandVoice consistently. On a BrandVoice post we checked on 10 October 2026, a December 2025 article in SAP's section, the signs were all there:

1. The label under the headline. It read "for SAP BRANDVOICE | Paid Program".
2. The byline. The writer was described as a "Brand Contributor", not Forbes Staff or Contributor.
3. The address. The URL sat inside the brand's own section, forbes.com/sites/sap/, rather than under a journalist's name.
4. The links. Every link out to the brand's websites carried rel="nofollow".

The "for [brand] BrandVoice" line matters if someone other than Forbes offers you a BrandVoice article. A company that runs its own BrandVoice section can, in principle, mention or interview a client there, but the page will say it was published for that company's BrandVoice, and it is still that company's paid content. Before paying for anything described as BrandVoice, ask whose section it will appear in and ask for live examples. Our guide to how to get featured in Forbes covers the other kinds of offer you may see.

What BrandVoice does, and does not do, for a brand

What it can do

• Put a steady stream of your content in front of a business audience, with promotion bought as part of the package.
• Give you production help from Forbes's studio if you do not have writers, editors or designers in house.
• Keep you on the right side of disclosure rules, because the labelling is built in and consistent.

What it does not do

• It does not make you "featured in Forbes". The FTC's guide on native advertising says an ad should not suggest or imply to consumers that it is anything other than an ad, and that advertisers are responsible for making sure native ads are identifiable as advertising. "Our article on forbes.com, a paid BrandVoice post" is accurate; "as seen in Forbes" implies an editor chose you.
• It does not build ranking links. Google's spam policies list "advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit" as link spam, and say paid links should be marked rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". The BrandVoice links we checked were nofollow, which is correct and means they pass no ranking credit.
• It does not count as independent coverage for awards, for Wikipedia, or for anyone doing due diligence who knows how to read a byline.

None of this makes BrandVoice a bad product. It is transparent, properly labelled advertising. The mistake is buying it, or anything sold as it, when what you wanted was editorial coverage.

Is BrandVoice worth it? Who it suits

BrandVoice makes sense for a company that wants to publish regularly for a business audience, has a marketing budget measured in hundreds of thousands, and will judge it as a media buy: reach, engagement and leads against cost. That is who its advertiser list has always been made of.

For most founders and smaller companies, the honest answer is no. Ask what the job is:

• You want Forbes journalists to write about you. Pitch them. It is free, and nothing else gets you there. In Muck Rack's State of Journalism 2026 survey, as summarised by the University of Minnesota, 86% of journalists said at least some of their work began with a PR pitch, 62% preferred a one-to-one email and 69% preferred pitches under 200 words.
• You want to publish your own thinking on forbes.com. Forbes Councils is the far cheaper paid route: its dues page lists Standard membership at $2,800 a year plus a one-time $600 initiation fee, if you qualify and are accepted. Our guide to what Forbes Councils costs covers the plans and terms.
• You want one credible article about your company that people find when they search for it. A labelled sponsored feature on a business publication does that job for a few hundred dollars. It will not be Forbes, and it should not pretend to be.

If you still want BrandVoice, contact Forbes directly, and get in writing the monthly fee, the minimum term, how many posts and how much promotion it includes, and what reporting you will receive.

BrandVoice compared with the other routes

How the options compare, if the aim is credible content about your company that people can find:

BrandVoice figures are from the Digiday, InPublishing, Nieman Lab and Marketing Dive reports cited below; Councils figures are from its dues and publishing pages. To be clear once more: Blue Leopard Media does not sell placements on Forbes, and our features never appear on forbes.com. What we sell is a different product, published on the magazines listed on our PR page.

If you have a six-figure content budget and want to publish on forbes.com every week, talk to Forbes about BrandVoice. If what you need now is a well-written company feature for a launch, a raise or a milestone, live within 24 hours of your approval and clearly labelled, our business publicity service starts at $249: see PR pricing or contact us below.