Belgian business media network
Forbes, The Brussels Times, Business AM, Beursduivel, KMO Insider, Generation WOW and Bloovi: one connected network to reach business leaders, investors and entrepreneurs while they're actively deciding.
Who we reach
Business leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, B2B decision-makers and C-level executives. All reading different brands in our network, in an active state of mind: researching, comparing, deciding.
The definitive read for entrepreneurs and business leaders in Belgium.
The go-to source for B2B decision-makers and international business.
Where investors start their day, before the market opens.
SME owners looking for practical, applicable business advice.
Women business leaders, hungry for inspiration and loyal to the brands that show up.
Belgium's next generation of business and tech talent.
Active retail investors, tracking markets and comparing financial products.
Content drives engagement
Real monthly performance across our media brands, not media-kit estimates.
Why it works
A message placed inside editorial content your audience already trusts borrows that trust. That's the difference between an ad they skip and a story they read.
Stand out, partner up
Meet your audience at every stage of their decision: awareness, consideration, conversion.
Enterprise campaigns, co-branded events or a bespoke content series across our network. Let's design it together.
Talk to usTrusted by
Across finance, mobility, services and real estate.
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With Saxobank. 10 days of uninterrupted attention.
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A Year-plan with events, video, social & articles
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A structural year-round presence within the Generation WOW ecosystem
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Updates, results and announcements from our media brands.
Between January and August, monthly readers on Forbes.be grew by 61%, while the total Forbes social community more than doubled. Several major content initiatives and events are lined up next.
Forbes Belgium continues to accelerate its digital growth in 2026. Between January and August, the number of monthly readers on Forbes.be increased by 61%, while the total Forbes social community more than doubled, growing by 113%. And with several major content initiatives and events ahead, the next chapter of that growth story is already taking shape.
Forbes Belgium is strengthening its position as a digital platform for entrepreneurs, business leaders and professionals.
The results from the first eight months of 2026 underline that momentum. Monthly unique readers on Forbes.be were 61% higher in August than in January, with particularly strong growth during the spring and early summer.
Even after the traditionally quieter summer period, the platform quickly regained momentum, with digital reach increasing by 22.5% from July to August.
The acceleration is even more pronounced on social media. Across Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and Facebook, the Forbes Belgium community grew by 113% between January and August.
Instagram grew by approximately 144%, while LinkedIn increased by 58%. TikTok recorded the most spectacular relative increase, with the community now more than ten times larger than at the beginning of the year.
This growth demonstrates how Forbes Belgium is expanding beyond its established business audience and increasingly connecting with a new generation of entrepreneurs, professionals and future business leaders.
One of the key drivers behind this momentum has been Celebrating Belgian Success, Forbes Belgium's content platform dedicated to the people, ideas and achievements shaping Belgian business.
Featuring prominent Belgian names including Dimitri Vegas, Marc Coucke, Fabien Pinckaers and Michele Sioen, the series translates compelling entrepreneurial stories into content designed to travel across the entire Forbes ecosystem.
In-depth conversations and articles provide context and substance, while video and short-form social content bring those same stories to much broader digital audiences.
The result is a content model in which one powerful story can generate engagement across multiple platforms and formats, turning individual interviews into conversations that are watched, shared and discussed by the wider Forbes community.
The next step is bringing that growing community together. On 19 November, Forbes Belgium will record the final episode of Celebrating Belgian Success in front of a live audience of entrepreneurs and business leaders.
It will bring the concept full circle: what started as a content series celebrating Belgian entrepreneurship will become a live experience where content, community and networking meet.
The event also illustrates a broader evolution within Forbes Belgium. Digital reach is increasingly becoming the starting point for building communities that connect online content with meaningful real-life experiences.
Just eight days later, on 27 November, Forbes Belgium will bring together the next generation of Belgian entrepreneurs, innovators and changemakers for Forbes Under 30.
Under 30 has traditionally been an important driver of audience and social growth for Forbes, generating significant attention and engagement around the young entrepreneurs featured by the brand.
With the digital Forbes community entering this year's Under 30 period significantly larger than at the beginning of 2026, November provides another opportunity to accelerate that momentum.
This year, the Under 30 ecosystem will also expand with a new podcast: The Road Ahead. The podcast will look beyond today's achievements and focus on what comes next: the ambitions, ideas, challenges and opportunities shaping the future of a new generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders.
Together, Celebrating Belgian Success and The Road Ahead represent two complementary sides of the Forbes story: celebrating the Belgian leaders who have already built remarkable success stories, while giving a voice to the generation that is building what comes next.
For Connected Media, the most significant development is not one individual growth percentage, but the way these different channels increasingly reinforce each other.
More people are discovering Forbes through social media. More readers are engaging with Forbes.be. Strong personalities and entrepreneurial stories create content that travels across platforms. And increasingly, those digital audiences are being brought together through podcasts, events and live experiences.
That creates new opportunities for advertisers and partners as well. Brands can connect with relevant business communities through stories that live across web, social, video, podcast and events, rather than through isolated media placements.
The January-to-August results therefore point to a broader evolution: Forbes Belgium is developing from a business media brand with a digital presence into an integrated business platform where content, personalities, community and live experiences reinforce one another.
With the live finale of Celebrating Belgian Success on 19 November, the launch of The Road Ahead and Forbes Under 30 on 27 November, the next major growth moment is already on the horizon.
Bloovi has reinvented itself before. We asked founder Marnik why a relaunch was needed again, what changed beyond the design, and how the platform proves its reach is genuinely engaged.
New ideas had been building up for a while, ideas the previous website had no room for. We have now been able to process all of them into the new website. We have turned Bloovi into a full media platform: a dynamic platform with a varied offering of content formats. Entrepreneurs and decision makers remain our target audience.
The new content formats include articles across 9 themes, daily business news, weekly books coverage, frequent columns, a weekly cartoon, daily reflections, a daily "In the spotlight" section with 5 categories, curated LinkedIn posts, weekly podcasts and daily video shorts. Club Bloovi gives subscribers exclusive access to top events, business trips and travel, and Bloovi Brand Studio, the content marketing and advertising division, now has its own dedicated place on the site.
Online media is in constant development, and Bloovi has to evolve with it. We thought first of all about our audience: our readers and followers. There is an abundance of content, yet a real need for insights, experiences and vision from experienced entrepreneurs and innovators. That is exactly what we built the new site around.
The design was fully refreshed too, giving Bloovi a far more current look as a media platform. But above all, we made the site a lot more user-friendly, with each section getting its own clear navigation and all content easy to find, both for readers and for findability in Google and AI tools.
The choice of those content formats was preceded by research among part of our readership. We made that decision based on the input and feedback we received. The goal was a good balance between short, snackable content in audio, video and text, combined with longreads, an approach that fits Bloovi well and matches our audience.
Bloovi is not new to the market. It has been around for 14 years, and in all those years it has built a strong reputation and a credible brand among entrepreneurs and decision makers. For many, Bloovi has become a love brand.
It is exactly that dynamic mix of content formats that resonates, combined with careful daily curation of what we do and don't publish, plus Club Bloovi's travel and events. Bloovi always looks ahead, sometimes visionary, always setting direction: an authority and thought leader under the motto "Sharing the Blooming Vision."
Bloovi Brand Studio is the content marketing and advertising division at Bloovi. We link your brand to Bloovi's large reach, to become top-of-mind with the entrepreneurs and decision makers who matter, using the same values and content standards that made Bloovi what it is.
The difference isn't in the format, but in how the content is created. We want a kick-off, or at least sufficient input from the client: which themes do they want to communicate about, what message do they want to convey, and who do they want to reach? We know marketing well and have a lot of experience with that.
We also work around nine clear themes that sit at the center of everything we do, from content creation to events and travel: Business Growth, ESG, Financial Growth, Leadership, Lifestyle, Longevity, People & Team, Society, and Tech & Innovation.
That is indeed a sharp promise, and to date we have always been able to keep it. Again, that comes down to the fact that we never create and publish purely promotional content. We always think "the reader first."
That is also why entrepreneurs work with Bloovi: we help you get inside the heads of entrepreneurs, we invest in earned, owned and paid content and socials, 92% of our readers and followers hold decision-making authority, and strong content on Bloovi drives a 37% increase in trust in a brand's credibility, which activates the decision to become a customer. We are more than a media platform. We are a strategic content partner, with a large reach among a qualitative and engaged audience, building the story that positions you as an expert and thought leader. Content on Bloovi also boosts findability in Google and AI tools, and strengthens your other channels.
Content is not a goal in itself. Measuring marketing only on views, clicks and reach measures what's easy to measure, not what truly matters. That's why the renewed Bloovi puts a broader view of return explicitly at the center.
Trust and thought leadership. An entrepreneur rarely buys from a brand they don't know or trust well. Strong storytelling, where an expert, founder or CEO shares their vision, knowledge and experience without a sales pitch, builds that credibility, and it carries weight when the purchase decision is made.
Consideration. B2B purchases are often slow decisions, frequently with several people at the table. Our readers are entrepreneurs and decision makers. Whoever gives them insight at the right moment ends up on the shortlist when the need arises, and they genuinely read: on average three to four minutes, with around 70% reading to the end.
Clicks and leads. While we never guarantee the number of clicks or leads from published content, every article contains subtle text links and, where desired, a clear call to action to the partner's website.
Sales enablement. Strong content on Bloovi is also ammunition for your sales team: send it after a first conversation, use it in a proposal, or share it with a hesitant prospect. An independent platform like Bloovi telling your story often convinces more than your own sales material.
SEO and GEO. Our articles are written to last and stay online for life. They remain findable through Google and often rank well. Content on Bloovi also strengthens findability in AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini, which draw on credible, well-written sources, reach that keeps working for years, not just in the week of publication.
Content that keeps working through your own channels. What we create together can be reused by the partner on LinkedIn, in the newsletter, on the website, in recruitment, all within one investment, instantly becoming owned content too.
Frequency and continuity. Trust and recognition aren't built with one campaign, but by staying visible all year round with the same audience, on the same platform. Whoever returns regularly with relevant insight gradually becomes top-of-mind, the brand an entrepreneur thinks of spontaneously when looking for a solution. Each new article builds on the last, together forming a credible body of work that stays online. That's why we prefer to work with partners on an annual basis, with a considered mix of formats rather than isolated one-off campaigns.
We always keep a close eye on the balance between the volume of editorial content and paid content from our partners: an 85-15 ratio, with 85% editorial and a maximum of 15% paid.
This comes back to the many content formats. We can build a content plan that deploys that full range of formats over a full year. Let's talk, so we can ask the right questions, listen, and put together a genuinely diverse content mix.
Premium financial brands that already invest in TV, radio, outdoor and social have paid for half the journey. The other half happens somewhere else: in the moment their best prospects are thinking about money.
You've done the hard part. Your brand is on television, on the radio, along the motorway and in everyone's feed. Ask a random Belgian and they will probably recognise your logo. And yet the people you want most, the entrepreneur who just sold a stake in her company, the CFO with a bonus to put to work, the specialist who wants a second opinion on her portfolio, don't pick up the phone.
That is rarely a creative failure. It is a context problem. The woman who saw your spot during the evening news is a different person at 7.30 the next morning, reading the markets page with her coffee. In the living room she is a consumer. At her desk she is an investor. Broad media reaches the first. Business media reaches the second.
Full disclosure: we sell business media, so read what follows with healthy suspicion. But the evidence below is not ours.
Broad media is the right starting point, and the science backs it. Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute showed that at any given moment only a small share of buyers is actually in the market. His own example is banking: companies change their main bank roughly once every five years, so only about 20% are in the market in a year and around 2% in a month. Switching broker, private bank or wealth manager is an equally rare decision for a private investor.
So the job of advertising is to be remembered by the 95% who are not shopping today, so that you come to mind when they are. Les Binet and Peter Field's work for the IPA points the same way: in financial services the optimal budget can lean as far as 80/20 towards brand building, and financial brands historically have one of the worst balances of brand and activation.
But there is a catch. When a high-net-worth prospect does move into the market, fame alone does not close the deal. Moving your savings or your company's treasury is a high-trust, high-involvement decision. People look for proof, expertise and reassurance, and they look for it in the media they already trust with their money questions. If you are not there at that moment, the memory you paid for helps your competitor's shortlist as much as yours.
Three findings come back in study after study, across countries. Trusted news environments lend their credibility to the brands in them. Ads that match the reader's state of mind get noticed faster and remembered longer. And senior business audiences are heavy, attentive readers of exactly these media.
| Study | Market | Finding | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Newsworks / Peter Field, IPA Databank (campaigns 2018-2022) | UK | Campaigns that included news brands were 52% more effective; adding print and digital news brands made TV 125% more effective | Business media does not replace your TV budget, it makes it work harder |
| Newsworks trust study | UK | Brands advertising on news brand sites are seen as 1.5x more trustworthy than on non-news sites | Trust is the currency of a wealth decision |
| NRC Media experiment | Netherlands | The same ad for a made-up brand was rated clearly more positively in a familiar, trusted newspaper than in an unknown one | The halo works even for brands readers don't know yet |
| IAS / Tobii eye-tracking (2022) | International | In-context ads were noticed in 0.4s vs 1.0s, with 14% higher purchase intent and 4x more unaided brand recall | An investment message next to investment content is seen first |
| GumGum / SPARK Neuro (2020) | US, UK, Japan | Contextually relevant ads drew 43% more neural engagement and 2.2x better ad recall | Context changes how the brain processes the ad |
| Ipsos Global Business Influencers | Europe, US, Asia | Senior executives in Europe used 14 media brands a month, spending 33 minutes per session with a brand | High-end audiences read deeply, not in passing |
| Ipsos Decision Makers Survey (923 top managers) | Belgium | 88% had used a Belgian business media brand in recent months, against 40% for international titles | In Belgium, the decision moment happens in local business media |
A fair warning: some of these studies were commissioned by media owners or ad-tech firms, and the neuro study used only 60 participants. Byron Sharp has also challenged the data behind the 60/40 rule. The direction, though, is consistent across very different methods: the same ad in a trusted, relevant context does more.
HSBC Private Bank, Europe (2009). At the height of the financial crisis, HSBC's private bank ran a $10 million campaign built around 13 one-minute features on alternative investments (art, wine, private equity, real estate) on CNBC's Squawk Box Europe, backed by targeted editorial in financial media. It generated more than 600 leads from high-net-worth prospects; the first week alone produced eight leads with $2 million or more to invest. Brand awareness rose from 49% to 69% in four months, and ad recall among the FT's target audience reached 41%.
Accenture and the Financial Times, Europe (2021). Accenture had awareness but trailed the Big Four on perception among C-suites. Instead of buying more banners, it sponsored a new FT editorial series with leading economists, three co-hosted webinars, a podcast mini-series and premium newsletters. Some 1,200 senior decision-makers attended the webinars, which fed straight into lead generation. After the campaign, awareness across EMEA was up 60% and consideration was 31% higher among readers who had seen the ads than in the control group. Not a bank, but exactly the same audience.
Belgium: a market in motion. Belgian investors are moving. Saxo reported eight times more new Belgian investors in 2024 than the year before, with new clients about ten years younger than its existing base, and its number of trades doubled in January 2025. More people entering the market means more decision moments, and every one of them is a chance to be the brand that shows up with expertise rather than just a logo.
Think of it as two layers that do different jobs for the same prospect. Broad media builds the memory with everyone, long before they need you. Business media meets them at the moment they are thinking about money, lends you the credibility of a trusted newsroom, and gives them a reason to act now.
Neither layer is enough alone: without the first, nobody remembers you at the decision moment; without the second, the memory you built is cashed in by whoever shows up with the most convincing expertise.
If you already invest in broad media, the expensive part is done: people know who you are. What's often missing is the second encounter, the one that happens when your prospect is reading about markets, tax or the future of their company, and is ready to listen to someone who knows what they're talking about.
In Belgium, those voices are Forbes, Bloovi, Beursduivel, Generation WOW, KMO-Insider, The Brussels Times and Business AM: the brands business leaders, investors and entrepreneurs turn to when they want to make sense of what's happening. Our job is to work with you on what you want to tell them, and to shape it to the way they already read, listen and think. Then your message doesn't feel like an interruption, but like something worth their attention.
We've done this with a number of brands already, and learned a few things along the way, some of them the hard way. If you're curious how those campaigns worked and what we'd do differently today, we're happy to walk you through them.
Klaas Olbrechts
Sources
Agenda
A running calendar of launches and events across our media brands. New dates are added as our partners confirm them.
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