Forbes, the legendary financial magazine that has spent the past few years aggressively exploring new online business models, was put on the auction block last fall. The whispered price tag — based on whispers that seemed to come primarily from the magazine’s existing owners, the Forbes family and the Bono-backed venture fund Elevation Partners — was around $400 million, but the credibility of that number was difficult to gauge because Forbes‘ financial performance wasn’t public. Until now.

Ken Doctor, a media consultant who also writes for the Nieman Journalism Lab, got his hands on a copy of the financial documents that Forbes has been giving to potential bidders — a group that appears to include primarily companies in Europe and Asia, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

As Doctor notes, anyone who expected to see evidence of a business-model breakthrough or a jump in…