In August 2006, when Roger McNamee invested in Forbes, he did so in part because its Web audience was thought to be huge. McNamee is a founder of Elevation Partners, a Silicon Valley private-equity firm that counts Bono of the rock band U2 as one of its managing partners; it specializes in big, bold investments in media and technology. Onstage at EmTech, Technology Review's annual conference, he said, "Look: I'm not investing in Forbes for its dead-trees business."

At the time, Jim Spanfeller, the chief executive of Forbes.com, claimed that more than 15 million readers around the globe had visited his site in February, making Forbes the world's leading business site. He supported his boast with research from ­ComScore Media Metrix, one of the two leading suppliers of third-party traffic data for the Web. The numbers seemed safe enough: Forbes­.com's internal server logs showed even greater Web traffic. It was embarrassing, therefore, when ComScore announced that it had changed the methods it used to estimate worldwide audiences, and that little more than seven million people had visited Forbes.com in July. That placed Forbes's online audience below those of Dow Jones (whose sites include WSJ.com) and CNN Money (whose sites include Fortune). Bitchy press accounts suggested that McNamee had been overcharged--if not actually robbed--for his investment, which was variously reported at between $250 million and $300 million.