Forbes' billionaire chairman and editor-in-chief Steve Forbes praised the "unique characteristics of print" at the launch of the group's maiden European title, Forbes Europe, last week.
The media group has dipped a toe into the European market with the title, which has an initial circulation of 20,000 copies and is printed by Quad/Graphics Polish subsidiary QuadWinkowski for distribution in 11 countries.
Asked what the merits of a print title were to the group's target C-level executive audience, most of whom would own iPads, Forbes said: "How you deliver the information does not mean that you have to rely exclusively on one platform.
"Print allows you to delve into a story much more thoroughly. Online allows you to amplify and spur on a story, which gives you the grist to develop another print story. Each platform is different but each has unique positive characteristics for conveying information."
The group places equal importance on its online and print products and unusually for a publishing company derives almost equal revenue from each medium.
President and chief executive Mike Perlis said: "Forbes was very early to the digital marketplace; we set up Forbes.com independent to the magazine, allowing it to grow into a real powerhouse. Digital revenue isn't just a small piece of the picture for us; from an advertising standpoint it's roughly half – actually it's a little bit more than the advertising we enjoy in print."
At present Forbes Europe is editorially a carbon copy of the US edition – although the group is beefing up its European headcount and Perlis expects the title to start to differentiate itself within 18-24 months.
"We have journalists on the ground here – we're agressively recruiting what we think will be 25-30 European-based contributors who will contribute their content using our new platform," he added.
"It's hard to track but it looks like of the 19-20m unique visitors to Forbes.com we have monthly 1.5-2m of those are in Europe so it's very much worth our while to invest and create more content that is specifically European."
Perlis said he expected Fobes Europe to ultimately comprise a mix of local, regional and global content, with versioned content by country "a real possibility" in the future.
Forbes Europe's 20,000 readership, around 90% of which is controlled circulation, pales in comparison to the 6m+ global audience of Forbes magazine and is less than a third of the 70,000 circulation of nearest rival, the Wall Street Journal Europe.
Kevin Gentzel, chief revenue officer at Forbes, denied that this represented a conservative European launch for the 100-year-old company.
"I believe that it's our first step towards a bigger presence in print in Europe," said Gentzel.
"We felt distribution to C-level executives throughout the continent was an important audience to receive the product, especially given our research that showed that these people were still turning to business magazines as frequently as the web to make better business decisions."
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