Forbes Scraper Separating Staff Reporting From Contributors

Two articles on this site can carry the same masthead and mean entirely different things: one is staff reporting, the other is a contributor's opinion.

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forbes.com
Forbes Scraper Separating Staff Reporting From Contributors
forbes.comwhat you get
Typical fields for news sites
headlinesectionauthorpublished_aturlbody_text
Delivery

API, JSON feed or CSV, XLSX and JSON files

Schedule

One-time, monthly, weekly, daily or 3 times a day

Managed Forbes collection, run end to end by us

  1. You send

    Forbes pages, filters, fields and a schedule

  2. We run the scrapers

    Built, monitored and repaired by our team

  3. You receive the data

    API, JSON feed or CSV, XLSX and JSON files

ScrapeIt runs the collector as a managed service. You name the sections, companies or topics; we build the pipeline, run it on your cadence and hand back CSV, JSON, Excel or a push into your warehouse, with author type on every row and ranking lists as their own records.

Cadence is per section. Fronts during an active story justify frequent passes; archive work runs slower. Request pacing and anti-bot handling are part of the service.

The dataset is metadata, entity extraction and publicly rendered text. We collect only public pages - what any visitor can see on Forbes - and we collect them legally.

Forbes fields in every export

The article record covers canonical URL, headline, standfirst, section, byline, publication timestamp, last updated timestamp, item type and the article identifier.

Author type is the field that makes this source usable: staff, contributor or other, taken from what the page states rather than inferred from the name. It sits next to the byline so a client can filter, weight or separate at will, and so that any total can be recomputed either way without going back to the source.

List and ranking items are typed separately, with the list name, edition year, position and the entity named at each position. Those compilations are among the most cited things the site publishes and they do not fit an article schema at all.

Front observations run alongside, recording which items sat on a section front, in what order and when. On a site with heavy contributor volume, promotion is a much better proxy for editorial attention than a count of published items.

Then the usual context: topic tags where published, publicly rendered body text and word count, outbound links, lead image URL, and the collection timestamp on every row.

Forbes fields in every export
Lists, contributor networks and cross-outlet comparison

Lists, contributor networks and cross-outlet comparison

Ranking lists are worth their own collection. Name, edition year, position and the entity at each position gives a clean time series, and for the companies and people who appear on them it is one of the more valuable single facts a media dataset can carry.

Contributor network analysis falls out of typed bylines. Which contributors write about a sector, how often, and whether coverage of a company concentrates in a handful of authors is a question communications teams ask constantly and cannot answer from an untyped feed.

Cross outlet comparison is the usual extension and the reason typing matters beyond this source. A share of voice number across several business titles is only meaningful if each outlet's contributor or sponsored content is identified consistently, and outlets label it differently. We normalise that during collection.

Historical backfill is practical because article URLs are stable and section pagination reaches back. It runs as a one time job separate from the ongoing feed.

One brand, two very different kinds of article

Source
forbes.com
Category
news sites
Delivery
API, JSON feed, CSV, XLSX
Plans
From €169 a month
Get a quote

Forbes publishes staff journalism and, alongside it, a large volume of material from an external contributor network. Both appear under the same brand, in the same templates, with the same design, and to a reader skimming a feed they look identical.

They are not. Staff reporting goes through an editorial process; contributor pieces are written by outside authors under a looser arrangement, and the site labels them as such on the page. For a communications team measuring coverage, a staff investigation and a contributor's opinion column are not comparable events, and averaging them produces a number that overstates attention.

Section fronts such as business and innovation respond directly and carry ordered selections. Volume is substantial, and a large share of it comes from the contributor side, which is exactly why the distinction has to be in the data rather than in a caveat.

The site also runs lists and rankings that behave differently again: annual compilations with their own structure, entity rich and heavily cited, which are worth collecting as their own type rather than as articles.

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Forbes scraping plans and pricing

Airplane

€199one-time

Setup fee included

100,000
One-time
Up to 5 days
7 days

Helicopter

€169/ mo

Setup fee €499

250,000
Monthly
Up to 5 days
14 days

Glasses

€229/ mo

Setup fee €499

1,000,000
Weekly
Up to 5 days
30 days

Microscope popular

€349/ mo

Setup fee €499

2,000,000
Daily
Same day
60 days

DNA

€549/ mo

Setup fee €799

3,000,000
3 times daily
Same day
90 days

Delivery: CSV, JSON or XLSX files, our API or a JSON feed. MCP server on request.

Full plan details

Why the byline type decides whether the report is honest

A client asks how much coverage they got on Forbes. Untyped, the answer counts an investigative piece by a staff reporter and a contributor's enthusiastic column as one each, and the resulting number is presented to a board as attention from a major business title.

That is not a rounding error. Contributor volume can dominate the count for a given company, particularly one that is actively pitching, and a report built on the raw total tells the board something that is not true.

Typed, the same data becomes defensible: two staff articles, eleven contributor pieces, of which nine came from three authors. That is a picture somebody can act on, and it usually changes what they do next.

The second reason is source credibility weighting, which anyone building a media dataset for analysis eventually needs. Feeding a model a corpus in which opinion columns and reported journalism are indistinguishable teaches it that they are the same, and every downstream sentiment or salience score inherits that.

The third is the lists. A company appearing in an annual ranking is a specific, dateable, highly citable event that has nothing in common with an article mention, and it deserves its own row rather than being buried as one more item in a coverage count.

Who builds and keeps your Forbes feed

ScrapeIt is a managed extraction company, not a tool you have to learn. Our team builds the pipeline, watches it as templates and labelling change, and repairs it before your coverage numbers start counting the wrong things.

You see a sample first, in your format, over the companies or topics you actually track, with author type applied so you can see the staff to contributor split before committing.

FAQ

Still unsure? Write to info@scrapeit.io

Why does staff versus contributor matter so much?

Because they are not comparable events and the count hides it. Contributor volume can dominate the total for a company that is actively pitching, so a report built on the raw number tells a board it received attention from a major business title when most of what it got was opinion columns. Typed apart, the same data becomes defensible.

Where does the author type come from?

From what the page states, not from inference on the name. The site labels the distinction, so we read it rather than guessing, and we keep it next to the byline so any total can be recomputed either way without going back to the source.

Can you collect the ranking lists?

Yes, as their own type: list name, edition year, position and the entity at each position. Those compilations are among the most cited things the site publishes, they do not fit an article schema, and for a company that appears on one it is a far more valuable fact than another article mention.

How does this help with cross-outlet share of voice?

By making the comparison honest. Several business titles carry contributor or sponsored content and each labels it differently, so a share of voice number is only meaningful if that material is identified consistently across all of them. We normalise the typing during collection rather than leaving it to a spreadsheet later.

Is it legal to scrape Forbes?

Yes. We collect headlines, bylines with author type, sections, timestamps, ranking list positions and publicly rendered text. We collect only publicly available data - everything a visitor can see on Forbes - and we collect it legally.

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  3. 3

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