Case Study: Forbes achieves rapid CMS rebuild and major mobile traffic growth with MongoDB

Forbes Overhauls Publishing Platform

Forbes, a leading business publisher since 1917, faced a publishing platform that couldn’t keep pace with real‑time news and a global network of 1,000 contributors. The legacy CMS and frequent outages slowed editors and writers, delaying publication and making rapid iteration on features and formats difficult.

Forbes rebuilt its CMS on MongoDB, launching a custom backend in two months and a responsive mobile site in under one month with a very small engineering team. The new platform provides real‑time social analytics, a flexible document model that avoids schema rework, and transparent scalability—driving mobile traffic from 5% to 15% and quickly to 50%, improving viewership, ad revenue, and the speed of innovation.

Forbes

Steven Bond

Group Director, Software Development Team, Forbes.com