The strategy behind The Verge’s paywall

Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, writes about its new paywall.

Patel writes, “A few years ago, we decided the only real way to survive all this was to stand apart and bet on our own website so that we could remain independent of these platforms and their algorithms. We didn’t want to write stories to chase Google Search trends or because we thought they’d do well on social media. And we definitely didn’t want to compromise our famously strict ethics policy to accept brand endorsement deals from the companies we cover, which almost all of our competitors in the creator economy are forced to do in order to run sustainable businesses.

“So we decided to make our own site as valuable to you, our beloved audience, as we could. We bet that our redesign, and the introduction of Quick Posts and the Storystream news feed on the homepage, would let us stay focused on our readers and our work instead of traffic and metrics. Our goal was pretty simple: we wanted to make our site something worth coming back to over and over again. We wanted to be worth your time, every day.

“I’m happy to say that this worked: we’ve maintained a massive loyal audience despite industry-wide declines in Google referrals and big social platforms downranking links. The Verge’s homepage has always been the most popular single page at all of Vox Media, and now the average time spent on our homepage is more than six minutes. Half a million people read The Verge at least once a week — and those people read an average of 14 stories a month. 55,000 of you have come to the site every single day this year. A lot of you really like The Verge, and we’re eternally grateful for that — we intend to keep making this thing together for a long, long time.

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.