Malcolm Forbes must be rolling in his grave.

It used to be one of the big-three US business magazines and IMO had the most character of them. Then post-Malcolm online it started catering to a lot of outside contributors, often with various conflicts of interest, and generally sold its soul for clicks.

I think the outside contributors get paid for views. So you either write baity stuff to make it worth your while, or yeah, you have other interests that make it viable beyond the pay.

Kinda like underpaying engineers and ending up with “great ones that work for cheap” that end up being spies/doing espionage.

And some of it at least was paid placement as well that was theoretically vendor-neutral and reviewed editorially but pretty superficially.

Analysts, consultants, and so forth have long been willing to write for trade pubs for the visibility and maybe a few bucks. But the conflicts of interest have always been a bit problematic if only in them choosing what topics not to dive into. I did a fairly long-time blog for another pub and over time they decided their blog network had gotten too uncomfortable for them.