As CIO and co-founder at Avenue Z, I spend a lot of time thinking about how audience behavior, data and media-buying logic are converging. I recently commented on Forbes’ new ForbesPredict experiment in a Digiday article titled “Forbes tests prediction platform as engagement strategies move past search.” It’s a glimpse of where publisher engagement, first-party data, and advertising demand are headed next.
From Search Dependence to Prediction-Led Engagement
For years, publishers over-optimized search. That worked until shifting algorithms, zero-click experiences, and a noisy news ecosystem eroded the reliability of search referrals.
Forbes is responding by building its own prediction platform, ForbesPredict, with Axiom and embedding it as a widget alongside editorial content. Instead of real-money betting, readers make forecasts in exchange for tokens, with the explicit goal of driving engagement.
Readers see a “will / won’t” style question, answer on a sliding scale, and compare their views to the crowd. Notifications via email, SMS, push, or onsite prompts pull them back to see how their predictions are performing or to update their calls as a story evolves. In practice, it’s a habit loop built into the article page.
Crucially, the primary success metric isn’t pageviews. It’s daily active users and sustained time-on-site.
Why Prediction Environments Matter to Media Buyers
Prediction environments sit at the intersection of audience intent, probabilistic forecasting, and real-time sentiment, exactly where modern media buying is headed.
Historically, marketers have relied on proxies:
- Search queries as a signal of intent
- Social engagement as a signal of interest
- Panels and surveys as a signal of sentiment
Prediction experiences compress those into a single behavior: “Tell me what you think will happen, and how confident you are.” At scale, across politics, markets, culture, and brands, you’re not just seeing what people clicked; You’re seeing where they believe the world is headed.When media buyers talk about “planning into demand,” this is the kind of data that makes that phrase real.
Gamification, Comments, and First-Party Sentiment
Comments have long been framed as the way to “give readers a voice,” but they’re often dominated by a small, vocal subset.
Prediction mechanics offer an alternative – a gamified, low-friction way to participate without drafting a comment. Moving a slider or tapping a choice is easier than writing a reply, which means more participation and more structured data.
That structure is critical. A simple prediction like “70% chance this will happen” is far easier to aggregate, segment, and activate than a thread of unstructured comments.
Forbes is feeding this directly into ForbesOne, its first-party data platform, as a new layer of sentiment data aligned to content and topics. When you can segment audiences by what they read and how they feel whether it’s positive, negative, skeptical or bullish, your data starts to look very different.
That takes you beyond classic contextual or behavioral targeting:
- Context: “This person is reading about AI.”
- Behavior: “This person reads about AI several times a week.”
- Sentiment: “This person is optimistic about AI and confident regulation will catch up.”
That third line is where the next generation of high-value audience products will live.
Where This Goes Next
ForbesPredict is still in beta, and there’s plenty left to learn, like which verticals perform best, how sustainable token mechanics are, and how to avoid prediction fatigue. But alongside other publishers’ prediction partnerships and the broader shift away from search dependency, it points to a larger pattern – engagement products that double as data products.
When prediction experiences are designed responsibly, they give audiences a meaningful voice, help editors understand what readers believe, and provide advertisers with richer, more actionable signals.
If you’re interested in exploring how prediction-driven engagement and sentiment data can fit into your marketing strategy, reach out to the Avenue Z team to start testing what’s possible.
Read the full Digiday article: https://digiday.com/media/forbes-tests-prediction-platform-as-engagement-strategies-move-past-search/
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