Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of podcasts. I'm your friend, David Pierce. It's like 10:25 at night and I'm out for a walk. So, I work in my house and I work in the basement of my house, which means there are a lot of days I get to like bedtime about now and realize I haven't really been outside all day. Plus, I've been doing all this research into the incredible effects of walking on your creativity, on your health, on your brain, on your problem solving ability. One of the best things you can do in almost any situation is just get out and walk for a while. This is a thing I know intellectually and don't do nearly often enough, so I'm trying to follow the correct advice a little more. Anyway, today on the Vergecast, we're going to do something we've done a couple of times before, which is talk all about the Vergecast. We're going to do a whole episode about the Verge and the Vergecast and the future of media and video podcast and advertising. All kinds of questions you guys have been asking us about the Verge. I grabbed Helen Havlick, our publisher, and Nilay Patel, my co-host and our editor-in-chief, and we're just going to answer as many of your questions as we possibly can. Thank you to everybody who sent in questions. I'm going to go home. I'm going to catch my breath, and then we're going to make a podcast. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
All right, we're back. It's time for some navel gazing. Joining me now, the two people with whom I like to navel gaze, Nilay Patel. Hey, buddy.
And Helen Havlick, our publisher. You are the firewall. You are the business. We have a lot of like names and decals we need to print up for you. Helen, welcome to the show.
Thank you, David. I'm excited to be here. So, we haven't done a sort of full-on meta Vergecast since the end of 2024. I think we looked back and it was like December 10th of 2024. A lot has changed about the world and about the Verge and about everything since then. And we also just decided to do this episode because every once in a while we get to this point where there's a sort of critical mass of people asking us about sort of the same things about how we operate and how things work and what we're up to, and we're also in the middle of making lots of changes. So, this just felt like a good time. Glad to have both of you here. So, we're going to start with some news, which is that today, as you're listening to this Tuesday, our new website has rolled out. We've redesigned the homepage. Nilay, why don't you go first? Do you want to just describe what we've been trying to do with the new homepage?
Yeah. I'm really excited about it. I have to say on behalf of our product team that it's not a redesign. It is a restructuring and it's going to let us do a lot of things in the future. This is me trying to be a product person. It's a new architecture. No, it's actually a pretty small redesign in the scheme of things. Obviously, people react to things that look different and it looks different. So, our redesign in 2020, 2021, we made the story stream on the homepage. And basically the thesis was we should be able to tweet to our homepage. And so, we introduced quick posts. Quick posts are all over the site now. They're in story streams. We use them for all kinds of things. One day they will be federated, which we can talk about. And we ran what looks like a social media feed and our incredible product manager Danielle has been doing all these user surveys and people are telling her that they use the site like social media because they want to get off of social media. So they come to our site to look at a thing that looks like a social media feed but is made by real people you can trust and is not algorithmic in that particular way. And they leave comments and that's like one experience. Then there's another huge set of people that just want to see the stories, that just want to see all the stories from the Apple event or what the top stories that we've picked today are. And those ideas are in conflict. And I think, you know, if you're looking at the old site, you would just experience that all the time that there's this thing that looks like a RevCron feed. There's like following buttons and then there's like our top stories. And then I keep joking that Richard Lawler, our senior news editor, has the single most knives-out political job at The Verge because his job was to pin the stories that we thought were important in the feed. So they would stay there and everything else would flow around them. And that means people just asked him to do that all the time. So this is just like we've lived with this for a long time. We've had this design for a long time. And all we've really done now is we've taken the social feed component and put it off to the right and let it be a social feed with following at the top and quick posts. And it's just RevCron. It's the thing everybody wants from us all the time. Here's just a straight RevCron feed. We're not going to pin anything. You can scroll down it. We can post to it. There'll be lots of quick posts in there. You can comment away on it. And on the left is kind of a more magazine situation. We're calling them story sets. And you can see we can just take big moments of news and group all the stories together. We can have the more biting magazine style headlines that are just like explosion and then they have decks so we can explain what's going on in the headline underneath it which I think is very important in this context. And so we just have an ability to program our like big fancy premium journalism all together and make things that kind of feel like magazine covers and let those live and breathe while the feed on the right gets to, you know, just like pop along in real time as everyone's posting all day long. And I think that's like a little overdue quite honestly. We had to figure out how exactly we wanted to pull things apart. But it's just the beginning because what I really want to do is like have more feeds and like let you experience a Verge that integrates with the open social web and like feels, I keep saying, like a TweetDeck. I'm not exactly sure what that means. While we protect the, hey, it's an Apple event and you want to just show up here and see the top five stories from the Apple event and they're going to stay there and be there for you even while the real time feed is popping off over here.
Okay. And Helen, what's your angle on this? Is there a how do we make more money from the homepage question as part of this restructuring?
There is definitely a how to make more money. I think there's also an answer to how do we make the website do a better job for people, right? So, as Nilay said, we have kind of two audiences that hit the homepage. There's the people who are refreshing all day and they want this fire hose of fast turn content and then there's a bunch of people telling us, you know what, maybe I come to the Verge once or twice a week and it's hard to find things. It's hard to find the best things, the things I most want to read. From a business perspective, when we launched the new homepage, we launched a new kind of ad in that feed. It is a promoted post. It is very straightforward. We called it a quick post ad. But you all know it from social media as a promoted post that runs in that feed of content. And I love those. They are very clear to the audience that they're advertising. They are very integrated. They are a better experience than dropping a banner ad. They also perform a lot better than banner ads. So, we ran a test and they were getting like 17 times more engagement than a banner ad, right? And so this hopefully gives a better experience of the feed that will allow us to have more usage there and then we could serve more quick post ads there. Great. The other side is, you know, we're a subscriptions business. We're now almost a year and a half in. And part of running a good subscriptions business is helping people discover the best content, like the meatiest, most interesting, most edgy to Nilay's point, like the most interesting possible headline. And so having the curated side of this will let us specifically surface the stuff that we know our subscribers love to read or that we know is like something you can only get on the Verge that might make you more likely to subscribe. So there are definitely business reasons behind it, but I would say the kind of animating overall first principle is we need to do a better job of making people love using our website and use it more frequently.
Okay. So, and this actually brings us to I think our first question of the episode, which is about I think if I'm remembering correctly the last major feature we launched, which is following. So this is a question from Ian who says now that the ability to follow specific reporters has been around for a while, writers see how many followers they have or how many other writers have. Any friendly competition around who has the most? And similar to above, any surprises in the list of which topics have the highest follower count? I don't actually know the answer to any of these questions. So, Helen, I suspect you have more insight into how follow features are going than either Nilay or I. Any update there? Any answers for Ian?
Okay, I will answer the first part, which is Nilay famously does not give our writers many analytics and therefore I can confirm that we are not pitting our writers against each other in who is the most followed. That being said, we can start. Other than the giant screen in everyone's house that shows who is the most. Yeah. Well, I mean, as Nilay has said, our ambition with the feed is to make it more social over time. And so, will part of that be counts go up? You can see what's going on? Maybe. Never say never, but today it is true that David Pierce does not know whether or not he's the most followed writer at the Verge and I'm not going to tell him. Sorry.
I really like the idea of doing the sort of Apple style unmarked graphs just showing like Liz Lato went up 200% today and subscriptions. They're just always going up. This is great.
So the answer is no. We are not surfacing a leaderboard of most followed authors on topics. I wouldn't say there's huge surprises. AI is by a pretty tidy margin currently our most followed topic and I think that is what is going on in the tech industry. That's what people are interested in. I think what's interesting though is I looked at number three, four, and five, which are actually pretty equivalent in size. And I think it tells a pretty good story to the question earlier about how do people use the Verge to do different jobs. Numbers three, four, and five are news, gadgets, and business. So what are people using the Verge for? It's a great news utility, and I think if you look around the industry of tech news, actually not a lot of people are doing tech news anymore. And so there's a lot of people who depend on the Verge to just be the fire hose of breaking tech news, doing a good job of reporting and curating all in one place. Gadgets, a lot of people use the Verge just because they love technology. It's fun. They want like the fun stuff. That's what they're here for. And you have that kind of consumer audience. And then you have business. A lot of people use the Verge to be good at their jobs. Something I think Nilay talks about a lot when we redesigned the website, we didn't think about how many people have the Verge open on their second monitor at work on like a 30-inch desktop and then we had a bunch of complaints that we had been too mobile forward with our design. And so a lot of people use the Verge for work. So, I think you, you know, the topics people follow are about what you would expect. But I think you can really start to see the different jobs the Verge does for people.
Helen, do you want to have a digression into the future of responsive web design? Because I can do it right now.
All I'll say is this time, Will Joel, our senior creative director, when he was designing the new layout, he started with desktop first. And interesting. I will give you a hint. I think there's a better way to address people on mobile phones and maybe we'll launch that way soon.
Yeah. Yeah. The last thing I'll call out with follow features is actually people are really using the automated email digests you can get once you set up your follow things. People are opening them at a high rate. It's a new entry point for people to the Verge. So, that's been a really great part of that dynamic is people come to the homepage, but also now people are just getting emails of the stuff they want from the Verge. And that's how they're navigating in.
One thing, by the way, that I have no idea how to think about. It's true. As Helen is saying, we're getting a little more social. We're going to integrate with the open social web. The reason I keep saying TweetDeck is because maybe all I actually want the Verge to be ever is a feed of cool gadgets that you can follow. You know, like you can see how all that stuff would come together. Social networks have like buttons and I don't know what it means for a media brand to have like buttons on its stories. There are some that do. I think ESPN has them now. They're out there. People are trying it. I just haven't sat with it enough or thought about it enough. I'm curious for the feedback on it because something changes I think when you do that. So this is a fairly direct lead to the next question, which comes from I believe it's Goind, who says you've been public proponents of social internet protocols especially at proto. I would quibble with that but you know whatever. Nilay has said repeatedly that if the Verge were starting today it would put up a Blue Sky server. Has also teased that more protocol-based social and publishing features may be coming to the verge.com as soon as this year. I would love to know what the team at the Vox Media at large has been up to. What can we expect to see in the coming months and years in the realm of publishing and community engagement over protocols? Nilay, I think the question here is essentially what is sort of your current theory of the case about connecting the Verge to these broader open social protocols.
Yeah. Let me start with why I say if we were starting the Verge today, we'd start a Blue Sky server. I think all great media brands grow up with their distribution. So the Verge is just like a good example. We're like we started in 2011. We started a giant desktop website and like phones didn't exist in the way that they exist now. Like we came up with distribution on the open web and every media player thought that that was going to be the biggest thing in the world and that maybe played out or didn't. YouTubers came up with YouTube. They grew up with the thing that distributed them. And we don't have to do too much media theory, but I think that holds true. So when I say if we were starting the Verge again today, what would we do? The thing, the exercise in my brain is what is the distribution that's on the way up that you would build a thing around and maybe for the last five years the answer has only been YouTube and then there was like a brief minute when the answer was TikTok and I just think it's hard to survive on those platforms as we'll come to I'm confident in this conversation. And so when I say Blue Sky I'm like oh this is distribution that no one controls. There's no Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg literally with a knob being like I don't like you and turning you off which is a thing that I try to run away from. And so Blue Sky is like open distribution. ActivityPub is open distribution and that's why I keep saying that's what we would start. We would start a thing on the open distribution that no one controls and like try to make our own way. We have because these are all like open protocols. It doesn't mean we can't also just do that now. And you know a quick post is a social object if you think about it that way can really connect to those protocols directly now. A problem is that our entire site is built on a CMS, you know a few years ago was Chorus, this now today it's WordPress and our quick posts are still just WordPress objects, they're not actually like social objects so we have some work to do to bring them to the next turn so that when someone replies to a quick post on a platform like Blue Sky it shows up on our site and then we have a moderation problem, there's like layers and layers of things to solve. But it just seems obvious that we should connect to the next generation of distribution that no one controls because that to me is that's always the thing a media brand that's on the rise should be trying to do.
So is your sort of big idea there that ultimately every post on the Verge is also a Blue Sky post that sort of lives both inside and outside of the ecosystem?
I think, you know, for the way that Helen and I talk about it is, you know, you can get some traffic and that's great and you can't live or die on traffic. Like the traffic can go away. Like the Yahoo algorithm cannot send you traffic to your links on the Yahoo homepage anymore, which is a real experience that we've had. Google can go away. Like that's just traffic. It just comes and goes and that's great. The goal is to turn the traffic into audience and have people come to you directly and care about your brand and your people which we are very lucky that anyone is even listening to this. I don't take that for granted at all. And then the real goal is to turn the audience into a community. And we are very lucky that we have that too across platforms. And so I just look at these like open distribution protocols. I'm like, "Oh, this is how I can go get a bigger community, right? We're going to be where you are. And if you reply to us or like our post or engage with us on Blue Sky or Threads or Mastodon, we'll get some value from that too. And the people who are out on those platforms, we can bring them, we can curate that work in other ways. Like if I could retweet Casey once a week. I think that'd be really valuable. And then our audience on our platform would see Casey's work and they can engage with it directly. And that feels good to me in a way that writing a WordPress post about a Casey tweet has always felt bad to me. Do you know what I mean? Like no one wants to do that work. They just want to be like, "Here's this thing we saw that's great and like let our audience engage with it." And that feels of service to everyone. So we have a long way to go. I'm not saying we're going to get there tomorrow, but that is the vision is to say our community exists in all these places in a way that is additive instead of constantly dividing our attention."
Yeah, I can give you the ruthless business answer of why I was going to say I want your theory of the case. I'll give you the ruthless business answer of why I'm interested in open social web projects like Surf from the Flipboard team. So platforms like MetaX, they are openly hostile to news content in their algorithms, right? They have moved away from that. They are no longer great discovery sources for us.
Links in general, even forget news, just links.
They're not like good places to hang out anymore.
We talk a lot about like could you start a Verge now the way we started the Verge or you started the Verge 15 years ago? The answer is like probably not or you would need a lot more money because starting something for free and finding audiences for free is much harder now. A lot of audience discovery is people buying ads from Mark Zuckerberg, right? I would rather not give money to Mark Zuckerberg. I would rather spend money on journalists in our newsroom which means the discovery problem like can we solve it a different way? So if you were to say like what are three things that are excited about an open social web for us? We talked about quick post ads on our website. They're objects that run in our feeds. If you could follow those feeds out in the world on whatever like social platform you happen to want to use and then I could serve you ads there, that would be great for our business. As opposed to we're going to give those feeds to X for free and then they are going to sell ads and keep all the money, right? That's just a better business for us.
Secondly to the point of discovery I would love to acquire acquisition channels for us where again I don't have to pay to play right so the open social web is a lot more friendly to news. It is not, you know, so I think there's opportunity there for how do you get the next cohort of Verge audience. And then as Nilay said as we think about our website or product experience I think there's really fun ideas about how you create new product experiences that attract people to the Verge because the open social web you can surface in all kinds of different ways. So that would be my cold business answer of I would rather give our money to the newsroom than be buying acquisition from Meta or whoever.
Yeah. Like a couple years from now, I would like it to be obvious that big algorithmic social platforms feel bad and the Verge feels good, but like it has some of the vibes of I'm logging on to a community platform that is full of interesting people who are having real conversations. And again, we got a long way to go. These protocols are not ready for all the things we want to do that and I know we've been talking about this for ages. It is literally some of the stuff needed to get built, right? And there's still yet more things that need to get built. But I can see what it looks like. And I would like to make the argument to all of our constituents, to our audience first and foremost, to our staff, to people we're trying to hire, on Helen's side, to, you know, the advertisers that our site has all of the vibes and the excitement of a community platform, of a social platform, but none of the bad feelings. And it's going to take us a while to get there. It's not today, but it's where we are trying to go. And if I think we get there, I think we'll be okay.
I like it. All right. And just one follow-up question from David Pierce at the Verge, which is Helen, square all of this with the Verge is increasingly a subscription business, and we're putting more energy into bigger media reporting and we want to make a thing that people log into and pay for. The media industry has done a lot of chasing distribution to its own peril over the years. Why try and do both of these things simultaneously?
I think if you look at David, like the economic model of the Verge 10 years ago or any web business like the old economic model of the open web is dead. How that economic model worked is Google and at points in time Facebook sent a fire hose of traffic to different web pages. People served kind of advertising on those pages and for a period of time that scale was so big and that advertising product was like good enough although people didn't love it that it was able to support big newsrooms, big businesses. This hasn't just hit the journalism industry. So now the scale is going away and also what advertisers are interested in and learning about what performs in the advertising space is changing. And so the reality is you know as a purely advertising business advertising is very cyclical. It's volatile. Verge has a great advertising business that is still most of our revenue. But as we look to the future of where we need to be, we need to have a direct audience relationship. And to some extent, you know, to make good content and enable good journalists to do the work you want, you have to pay now. That is just the reality of the web. Where our business is more insulated than others is, you know, we weren't just selling on scale, right? We have a real brand. People love being around it. We have a very valuable audience. So the way we sell advertising, the kind of ads we serve that are very premium that are typically directly sold, you can like only reach the Verge that way that has insulated us from some of this like big scale collapse problem of the web. But when I look at where does the Verge need to go for this really great journalism to exist, we have come to a point where free advertising and free experiences on the web just can't support it. So, where I would like The Verge to go is that subscriptions, direct reader support more or less subsidizes most of our day-to-day operations. We should still have an advertising business. That is part of how we get scale. But in terms of what should be paid, what should be free? I think David, that gets into the how do you entice people in, how do you attract your new people, what are people doing with a hypothetical Verge app. If maybe they either can't or aren't ready to pay. I think we should have free experiences that people can access on the Verge. I think that's part of where feeds fit in. And so it is a tricky inflection point to navigate, which is, you know, people got the Verge for free for a long time. I know it's hard when we're saying, "Okay, I'm sorry. It's time to pay now." But the web has changed. The business of the web has changed. What advertisers want has changed. Like that old economy is dead. And so we are entering a place where we are now balancing these two things of subscriptions kind of powering the core of the business and then advertising helping us grow.
Okay. I just want to say for people counting that is now either one and a half or two mentions of a Verge app. Just throwing that out there. Our next question comes from Jupiter. And they ask, y'all have mentioned a few times that you have a young audience and I'm curious about a few things regarding that. When you say young, what do you mean? Are we talking 20s, college age, or even younger? How dramatic is that skew and demographic towards the younger audience? Basically a bunch of questions about who the Verge audience is. Helen, I know you did some work to answer this question. What do you have for us?
Okay. I have pulled some data on what the Verge looks like this year, so it's very current. The really interesting thing just to say right off the bat, David, is that we pulled website data and we also looked at YouTube and it's actually the same, which I think is fascinating about the demographics of both YouTube and The Verge. Where our split on age is identical on our own website as it is on YouTube. Okay. Our biggest readership is ages 25 to 34, people who more or less came out of college about 10 years ago. The next biggest group, millennials-ish, 35 to 44. And then we have about the same amount of readers who are 18 to 24 and 45 to 54. And then much fewer over age of 55. We don't collect data on the website of people 17 or younger. So, I can't speak to that. But that does say, you know, a lot of our audience is actually pretty young. I think why is that the case? I think you can look at several factors. So the tech industry has been booming for a long time, but I think as you look at like the move of people into STEM majors to enter what at least until recently was a stable career path in the technology industry, you can see that that's not the whole story though. You know, last time I looked at Comscore, I think the Verge's audience skewed about like 10 years younger than CNET's. So some of it's also been in our approach to coverage, how we surface content. So, for example, you know, a big part of the Verge newsroom is leaning into individual personalities. Making videos, videos that reach people on social platforms. We care a lot about design. And so I think within the tech cohort, we've managed to skew younger because we have voicy personalities who access feeds off platform in ways that young users are used to.
Talking about Nilay and me who are both 23 and extremely youthful, right? 23.
But the more we clip you, the more ubiquitous you are on TikTok, David. So,
It's true. I will say this. This explains a lot why the most common piece of information Nilay and I get from people we meet in the world is like, "Oh, it's so great to meet you. I've been reading The Verge since high school." And Nilay and I both just sort of crumble into dust every time someone says this to us.
I love to hear it. And also, we are hundreds of years old. It's especially bad when it's like a mid-30s person who is now a product manager at Google and I'm just like, well,
Yeah. I'm like, oh, we covered the thing that you made last week.
And you were a literal child when we started doing this.
By the way, the secret to this is not some like business juice. It's we just hire cool people. That's the whole secret. You hire cool people and let them have a good time at work. In especially in a creative industry, you're going to attract an audience of people who are looking for cool new things. Yep.
Like I said, we don't do that much analytics in our industry. And that's the first time I've heard those numbers in ages, too. And our strategy in so far as we have a strategy is we hired a bunch of cool people.
The last thing I'll call out here is I am thinking about how this fits in with our subscription. Something I would love to do is have like a super highly discounted subscription for students. Because I think you know to keep the Verge relevant long term to reach the right people to bring new people in we keep reaching young people and like training up the next set of Verge supporters and so that is on my wish list.
And I think that's where discounts very important and but also making sure the thing that we make for free is really good is also very important to me. And that the new design is actually going to help us get there and like pull the experiences apart. But that's all a swirl in my head is what's the thing that you start checking in in college between classes that you also start checking in between meetings at work. We can build something for that that's really good, I think.
Yeah. All right, let's take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to do a few more money questions before we get into some other stuff. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Let's play some voicemails that we got. This first one, actually the next couple in a row are just straightforward money questions. So, let's talk money. Here we go. Here's the first one.
Hey guys, this is Gordon from Washington DC. What have you guys had in terms of perspective about circling around business models that might work, venture capital, etc. But we always end up at advertising. This is true of written content, video content. It seems like now with all the streamers, do we really only have ads or how many outlets? How much room is there for organizations like The Verge to build sustainable subscription models? Thanks.
Do we really only have ads is such a perfect question about the internet. Helen, I'm curious for your take on this first.
I think my answer is subscriptions are emerging as one very viable business model. Especially for the news business often a subscriptions business can be smaller than an ad supported business but that's not necessarily the case right you can have a big subscription supported business and so I do think subscriptions could be a huge part of the Verge. We have given you all Vergecast listeners ad free experience here on the podcast if you subscribe to us for example and so we are as I mentioned earlier looking at okay how does subscriptions become a bigger and bigger part of our business while also saying you know advertising should be part of this mix can be part of this mix so it's not to say I want to break up with advertising. Advertising can be a really good business it can be a volatile business what products advertisers want to buy what is working you have to keep experimenting and changing you can't just set it forget it say the ads we were selling 10 years ago we can sell today but I think the future of the Verge is to have very thriving subscriptions and ad revenue that helps us be a big and great newsroom.
Yeah. You know, my paranoia the whole time we've been trying to make the Verge is that everything goes away. And so we've always just tried to be as diversified and direct as we can, right? We want to have lots of different businesses that are coming and going. We want to have lots of different traffic sources that are coming and going. They all go away in the end. But we want to be as direct with our audience as we can because if we can keep that alive, like everything else can come and go and we can build along the way. So that's that mix. I would actually just challenge that like not everything is advertising. It's just internet stuff tends to advertising. Like there are no ads supported plumbing companies. I wish there were you know just someone start one. I will do a Decoder with you all day and all night about your ad-supported plumbing company. And then even in the context of streaming not all streaming is the same. It's video streaming. Hollywood streaming is all kind of converging on one model but Spotify isn't adding ads to its premium tier. Like I and I think people would frankly revolt if they did,
but their free tier is where all their customers come from.
And that's a really important dynamic for Spotify. If you ask them, where does the next premium customer come from? Statistically, it is out of the free customer pool. And I look at that model and say, "Oh, there's something there that's we can model, right? Like we want to build a big free ad-supported business that looks like a cool news utility or a cool community thing that you can check that doesn't make you feel horrible and at some point you're going to see a story and you're going to say okay that's worth paying for and that's all I'm trying to get to is I don't want to fight it out click for click on social media to get subscribers I want to be like we're useful the whole time again I'm saying all this we have a long way to go we got a lot of stuff to build to do it I just see the glimmers of like oh this is how that kind of business could finally work in a way that, you know, it was hard to even make the case when we would wake up in the morning and like Facebook had sent us 5 million visitors or like Google had sent a flood of traffic. Like all that's gone now and so the idea that we have to make a case for a different kind of business is like one if you listen to the media CEOs come on Decoder they're like what should we do like you know and our ability to say okay this is a thing we've been thinking about for ages and it's crisp and it's clear has been a real benefit."
Yeah. And something about the Spotify model. Spotify makes significantly more money in subscriptions than advertising. But as Nilay is pointing out, that is a big part of their funnel into the paid subscription. Helen, one last thing on this. The very last part of this question is essentially about subscription fatigue. We've been at this subscription thing for about a year and a half now, and I think we talked about subscription fatigue and whether it was a problem before we even launched this stuff. What's your sense of sort of people's appetites for internet subscriptions at this moment in time? Is that a real thing we're fighting as a business?
I think our subscription is growing at a really healthy clip. I think when I think of subscription fatigue, it's often in the context of there's a bunch of fragmented things that do the same job for you and now they're all asking you for money, right? So TV and movie streaming I think is a great example of it's kind of a nightmare now to navigate like where to watch even a sports game, right? Like how many different subscriptions do you need to do that single job? I think where we want the Verge to play and what will insulate us, I hope a little bit from subscription fatigue is the Verge is a core utility in which there are not a lot of direct competitors. And a lot of our subscribers, you know, they're here for the utility, but they're also here because they love our journalists and they want to support the journalism. And so, as of right now, I'm not seeing that as a huge immediate problem for us. Now, do we need to do a good job? Do we need to be worth the money? Do I know people's wallets are under more pressure than ever? And so if I can have intro offers that help people get in the door at a cheaper price. I will be trying all of that, but I think we have a slightly different value proposition than someone who's saying, "Well, I just happen to own these five little pieces of the IP you want, so you'll subscribe for a month and then churn when the show's over."
Okay. Yeah. I mean, that is a really interesting way to frame actually a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about, right? That if like if we are up against a bunch of Substacks that you subscribe to and you have to debate between us and that that's actually we're in trouble, right? Like the Verge has to go be a different thing than that in order to be worth
Ideally what we are is a community for people. And I don't mean that in like the parasocial creator way, although I would love that. I have a book coming out next year and so if you could all buy that, that would be great. I mean that in the sense that our audience is a community. Like we can see it in the comments on our site. We can see it on the comments on our YouTube. We're starting to see it on the comments on our TikTok. Like these are folks who interact with each other, who have a shared set of values, who are willing to disagree with each other politely, right? Like that is very important. And I want the Verge to support that and nurture that. And I think landing great journalism in a community that is excited about it is like a really important flywheel dynamic. But if you're paying us, you should feel like you're part of something, not that we're just selling you links.
And I think you can really We have a lot of big competitors that are effectively selling you links.
Yeah. I think community is a big part of it. That's a big part of what makes people come back and really engage deeply. I think the other part is, David, what you're also getting at is like what makes the web bad today? What makes it harder to use and less fun than it used to be? And a big part of that is fragmentation. There's fewer big institutions that have everything in one place. There's fewer social networks that feel good to participate in and have everyone you want in one place, right? Like of the good tech journalists, some are still on X, some have decamped to Blue Sky, some are on Threads. So what is the experience of accessing all of that? I think where the Verge also has an opportunity as we talked about federation earlier is to help solve the fragmentation issue for people and be this great daily utility that helps you navigate all of this in one place and have you know all of the content and experiences you want to have in one place so you don't have to go follow five different Substacks remember whether the people you like are on Threads or Blue Sky or X and you just get it all in one place.
All right. This is a good segue to our next question, which I love all my children equally, but this is my favorite question of all of the ones we have for the show. Let me play it for you.
Hey, I just listened to the podcast and I love actually the Hype Desk thing. But just noticing a trend in you guys trying to monetize more, which I think is fine and fair, but is there I guess at some point could you guys just talk about is there a reason other than money why you're trying to capitalize on some of these things? I mean, money is fine, but like are you trying to do more things? Are you guys running out of money? I just I love you guys and I don't want you to stop making the podcast, but I also don't want this to become Clarity and stuff. So, yeah, I don't know. At some point, if you could just kind of talk through why you've done some things that are more money focused things by
You can see why I love this question. It's a great question.
Yeah. And I think it comes from my favorite place for this question to come from, which is like, I get why you want to make money. Please don't let money ruin this thing that I like. Which we think about all the time.
All the time. And I'll just start and then I'll let Helen
take it because Helen is the money. She's the business. We just spend money.
That's all we do over here. So here is the problem and I'll just say it's a problem. Because we make journalism and we are very precious and very prickly about the fact that we make journalism. There is money we won't make. It is and I know it drives the business side of our company crazy that in particular there's money I won't make. I won't read the ads, right? And because of that we have to try other things because you have to sell what people are buying and the advertisers have all moved to buying a kind of thing that we won't make because we make journalism. And so I think you're seeing all these new things. From my perspective, you're seeing us try all these new things, not because we need to like monetize more in like a gross like endless growth capitalism way, but because we have to make products that people want to buy. And the one product that people want to buy the most, we will not make. And maybe one day that'll be over and I will read the ads from my yacht. But that day is not today. So that's my perspective on it. I'll let Helen actually answer the question.
Yeah, I love the premise of this question, which is like maybe there's so much money right now and we're going and getting so much more money that it's just going to Nilay's yacht. I hate to disabuse you of this notion, but the digital media business, if you look around, is not minting an infinite flow of cash. Look at what's happened to BuzzFeed News. Look at what's happened to Vice. It is a tough business. And you should not take for granted that the publications and the people you follow and the things you love continue to exist. This industry is changing really fast. And we have to keep changing in order to just pay for these things you love to pay the journalists to pay for the podcasts. Like we just have to make enough money to do that. As Nilay talks about what is changing in the advertising business. We talked about this a little bit earlier of the kind of like old school display where you just have tons of scale from Facebook and Google. You throw up a random display ad, it maybe doesn't perform that well and it's running on like a random third party website. But it kind of all works out. That kind of model is increasingly going away. The Verge has a big direct brand, which means advertisers want to work with us directly. But advertisers are also, yeah, to Nilay's point, used to working with creators and platforms now, and they're looking for integrations. They're looking for people to try their products. They're looking for better ad products that are more relevant to audiences and perform better because they're inventing better ad
products out on TikTok, right? You get a bunch of people to endorse your product, maybe disclosing it, maybe not. That performs really well. Um, and so our challenge is how do we tap, how do we satisfy our customers on the advertising side while also protecting the firewall of the journalism. Um, and so Hype Desk came from that point where we're saying, okay, if Nilay and David can't go try the new product and tell you it's great, um, without compromising the newsroom, um, then how can we do that in a fun way where we have the really fun ad product that performs better, that is better to listen to or watch for Vergecast listeners or YouTube viewers or whoever. Um, and so we tried this hype test thing, which is to say, okay, we've got former journalists who are in the commercial space now. They're really fun. They're experts. Um, but they can take the money and play with the product and make a good ad product that performs well while also protecting our newsroom. Um, and so Hype Desk is one of our experiments in inventing new ad formats. We've talked about QuickPost ads as another place we are trying to invent ad products that perform better. Um, and so the reality is we need to keep improving the ad products we make. Um, as that industry changes, as the opportunity changes, um, and yeah, that's...
Yeah, I wish we were buying Nilay yachts every year, but I tell you for sure Nilay wishes that.
I've been working on that boat for 15 years, you guys. It's a paddle boat right now, but we have ideas.
You're just going to slowly build your paddle boat into a yacht. Is that the idea here? Just one Lego piece at a time.
And at the bottom is still me just battling away.
Um, Helen, this is probably a useful moment to update on the episode we did 18 months ago. Um, and basically just answer the question, how does The Verge make money? And you can answer that as broadly or specifically as you would like to, but I think we get versions of this question a lot. So we might as well just answer the how does The Verge make money question. The Verge makes most of our money in advertising today. We have a growing subscription business that is increasingly a significant revenue line for us. Um, but subscription businesses take a long time to build and so the inflection point at which subscription will overtake advertising is still some ways away. So we are primarily an advertising business.
Is that like display advertising on posts on our website?
Increasingly our ad mix, and this was kind of always the case there. So if we're going to get really nerdy about display advertising...
Even if you look at display advertising, there's two kinds of ways you can get to display advertising. There's stuff you sell directly and there's programmatic. Um, programmatic is like you let Google serve whatever, there's a bidding marketplace, things show up across any website. That is a lower... um, that pays out at lower rates.
But that was the Google premise, right? Like if you rewind to like 12 years ago, it was there's going to be so much traffic that even at tiny bits per page view, you can make it up in giant scale. And that's the scale everybody chased for a decade that has essentially mostly disappeared. That was the Google ads business that propped up like SEO firms, right? The Verge's display ad business has always been more skewed towards big direct buys. So an advertiser knows that they need to be on The Verge because that is where their client base is, their customer base. So they are working with Vox Media directly in order to access The Verge and do premium things. Vox Media has a whole other side of the company where we make ad tech. We make like fancier, nicer, better performing banner ads um that aren't this programmatic fill. And so that has been a strength of our business and continues to be a strength for our business. Um, but if you look at what kinds of things advertisers are buying, I would say writ large people are buying fewer things that are like a homepage takeover and they're buying more things that are like integrated into um a hype on The Vergecast or QuickPost ads or branded content or um you know events we do together. And so you see the kinds of advertising mix at large like moving off display into more integrated deals.
I can't believe it's... I have to do this because we never have to do this disclosure, but I have to do it. Our parent company is suing Google uh for antitrust violations because we ran that ad tech business and Google was found guilty of being an ad tech monopoly. There's your disclosure. I never think about it.
That might be the first time we've ever had to do that on the show. It never comes up, but there it is.
It's pretty good. Disclosure is our brand. Um, all right. I think we have one more sort of business/editorial question before Helen, we're going to boot you out of here and Nilay and I are going to do some other stuff. Um, and this is specifically about podcasts and audio and video. Uh, you'll see why this is a good transition for a bunch of stuff here. Let me just play this for you.
I love your audio podcasts. I love audio podcasts in general. I don't think they're as talkative about it, but most of the folks I know prefer it in the audio format. It's the space for us that's just kind of necessary and you can pop in a headphone, listen to it at work, if you're working in a warehouse, for road trips. It fills a slot that I think probably radio filled for the older generations. And I mean, I don't think everything has to be video. I'm sure there's ways to monetize it that you can't do with audio clips, but there's just something special about it and it's important. Um, not everything needs to be watched.
Basically, I think this is very much sort of equally an editorial and a business question, but I do think we've gotten a lot of versions of this question about like how do podcasts make money? Um, is the recent push to video fundamentally a push about how to make more money from podcasts? Um, and Helen, I'm curious on your perspective on this first and then Nilay and I are going to get deep in the weeds about our feelings about how to make video podcasts, but I want to know your thoughts on sort of how you're looking at podcast as a business and especially how video changes or adds to or subtracts from that.
Yeah. So, I will say personally I prefer audio podcasts too. Uh, they fit better into my life. That's how I like to listen to things. Um, and an audio podcast, I think there is something very intimate about the form of listening to someone, which also means the kinds of advertising you serve in an audio podcast are pretty high performing. Um, and so that kind of advertising of a big loyal audience who trusts the feed, who's highly engaged, it's really integrated into your daily life. That is a really good business. And that is currently the core of the podcast business as more of the revenue today is in audio. Now what does audio not do very well? No one has really cracked discovery of new listeners in audio in a really compelling way. I think we've done a good job of, you know, when we launched Version History, it started in this show. We worked really hard to bring people over to a new feed and that's been successful. Um, but no one solved the podcast discovery problem. And it is true that while the audio listeners have the thing they want and love, there is a new kind of listener that is, you know, consuming podcasts as video products. If you look at YouTube, it is now the biggest um podcast player in the world. There is a lot of new people who like listening to or watching podcasts in a new form. And so to reach those people, we have to have video versions of our podcasts and good products that work on those platforms. So I would say it is more about accessing new audience, bringing new people into our shows and getting them familiar with our talent. Um, the monetization is frankly not there yet on the video side. So it is more about future opportunity, getting new people in on the shows than it is about um you know an immediate like, 'Oh, video, it's where all the money is.' I do think it is where the opportunity to reach new people is, the opportunity to grow scale is, um because it is hard to grow audio only feeds um because I think because it is such an intimate powerful form and it's so personal how you listen to the people you care about.
Another version of this question we got from uh Anhel, I believe it is, was asking essentially about this in the context of even companies like Netflix getting into podcasts and getting into advertising. Like at some point I think the assumption from a lot of these players is that podcasts are a relatively inexpensive way to make lots and lots and lots of content that you can sell ads against, right? Like if you just sort of look at the pivot to podcasts in general, is it as simple as that? Like it's pretty cheap to make most podcasts compared to like even a sort of Stephen Colbert-sized late night television show. You just put mics on a table and people are comfortable with that and you can sell ads against it. Like is that, do you see that happening broadly here?
I mean I think what's old is new. It is not just about the money. It is also about the users and what users want to do, right? You look at what is winning on YouTube right now, it's like YouTube's either going super long or it's going super short. Like the heydays of like mid-form on YouTube, not just for news organizations, but you look at the creators and how they're doing it, it's like videos are either getting really long or they're getting really short. The distinction between a podcast and a video show is becoming almost meaningless. Everything is just a show now.
Yeah. And so, David, you're right that I think some of it is, okay, here is content that is engaging and we want to play there and that should be part of our business. It's also just what do the users want? Um, and I think increasingly if things are overproduced, you're seeing like a new aesthetic of what podcasts work on YouTube, which is actually like they are not overproduced. They feel like they are filmed in someone's garage. Yeah. And that actually I think is part of the audience connection is like a more casual authentic aesthetic on these long video shows. Um, so I think it's both about what are the users doing and where is the money going to go? The money follows the users.
Yeah, it makes sense. All right, we have actually, Nilay and I have more video questions for you, but let's get to those in a minute. Let's take one more break. Helen, we're going to release you back to go, you know, do more things to make us money, which is...
Go make money. Yeah, go make us money.
Thank you so much for having me. Um, I obviously love The Verge. I guess David, I will ask myself the question, how can the listeners of this podcast most support The Verge? Um, if we are not going to take our continued existence for granted.
Uh, this is actually a question we get a lot from people who are like, am I costing you money by listening to the ad-free version? If I want to help The Verge in the most ways that I can, what can I do? First of all, know that we love you, everyone who asked this question. And also Helen, this is a good question. What is the answer?
The single most important way you can support us is to pay and subscribe to The Verge. I know that is not possible for everyone. Other ways you can support us. You can use The Verge a lot. Listen to our products. Love our products. Um, if you are paying to subscribe, you are allowed to listen to the ad-free podcast feed. We love you. It's cool.
The thing that we sell you, you can use.
Yes. I give you moral permission to use the ad-free podcasts that are part of your subscription.
