Forbes tests prediction platform as engagement strategies move past search
By Sara Guaglione • January 23, 2026 •
Ivy Liu
Forbes has joined the fray of publishers adding prediction markets to their websites as part of a broader strategy to reduce reliance on search traffic and focus more on onsite engagement.
The publisher worked with tech startup company Axiom (Axiom founder and CEO Jeff Yam is a Forbes board member) to build its own prediction platform – ForbesPredict – which will launch in beta in February. Unlike real-money prediction markets like Kalshi or Polymarket, Forbes’ platform lets readers make forecasts and track results in exchange for tokens. It’s designed for engagement, not wagers.
The Predict tool will appear as a widget next to articles. Instead of letting users bet real money on news, Forbes is gamifying predictions to boost onsite engagement, and foster reader loyalty as it shifts away from relying on traffic, as search referrals erode, according to Forbes chief innovation officer Nina Gould. It’s an alternative to commenting, in some ways, she noted. In the future, Forbes may give out tokens for other actions on the site, such as asking users to provide more information on their registered accounts to glean more audience data, Gould added.
Users will get notified (through email, SMS, push or onsite notifications) on how they’re faring with their bets, to nudge them to return to the site to either change their vote (based on how the news story is evolving) or see how many tokens they’ve won.
For example, a story about the Oscars could have the game widget ask: “Will Leonardo DiCaprio win best actor for ‘One Battle After Another’?” The prompts will typically be a “will or won’t” question, and users can vote on a sliding scale to express how strongly they think the outcome will or won’t happen, according to Gould. Users will also be able to see how their votes stack up against other users.
ForbesPredict gives Forbes “the ability not only to create that daily habit with our audience, but also give readers a voice beyond commenting, which I think is ripe for trolls to scream into the wind. This was really an appealing way for us to think about how we can bring in our reader and our audience’s voice as another view into the news,” Gould said. She described the initiative as a “gamification of following a story.”
Forbes will monitor metrics like sustained engagement during a session, time spent onsite, and interactions with additional content, according to Gould. But the real “gold standard” metric will be daily active users, “an ambitious metric for anybody,” she added.
This comes at a time when other news and business publishers — such as Dow Jones, CNN, CNBC, and Yahoo Finance — have signed deals with prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi to share prediction market data across sites and broadcasts.
For ForbesPredict, unregistered site visitors get a certain number of tokens to use to place their votes, and if they sign up with their email they can follow the results of the prediction. The more actions they take (and the more they win), the more tokens they’ll gain. The widget will also surface other prompts that users can vote on.
Forbes aims to make money from this product through brand sponsorships. The sales team is pitching it to brands now, and discussing opportunities like a sponsor message in the widget, interstitial ads or branded prompts (“Will Coca-Cola launch a new flavor next month?”).
“Prediction markets are interesting because they sit at the intersection of audience intent, probabilistic forecasting, and real-time sentiment, which is increasingly how [media] buyers are thinking about demand,” Jonathan Snow, CIO and co-founder of marketing agency Avenue Z, said in an email.
ForbesPredict will also generate sentiment data for Forbes’ first-party data platform ForbesOne, Gould said.
“Having a layer of sentiment data from our audience available to us and aligned with our content is actually extremely valuable for us in terms of first-party data, in terms of how we might create different segments from our audiences, how we might sell advertising against our content,” she said. “You can really look at creating segments about people who feel positively or negatively about a particular topic, a particular company, things like that.”
The goal is to launch the product fully in the second half of this year. Until then, Forbes will test which articles to place the widgets in, and where the widget appears in the article. Breaking news is the “biggest area we want to test,” according to Gould, because of how timely those stories are — ranging from politics, weather, sports and entertainment. “Will Trump mention Greenland in the first five minutes of his presidential address?” was one example of a question in the widget, Gould said.
“We don’t know everything about how our audience is going to interact with this,” Gould admitted. “We are open to learning.”
