The success of the Verge tech news site

Jeff John Roberts of PaidContent.org writes about The Verge, a tech news site that launched a year ago.

Roberts writes, “Parent company Vox Media made an expensive bet on brand-name writers and bespoke publishing tools.

“In the month of October, comScore reports The Verge racked up 3.1 million unique U.S. visitors. It’s an impressive start but still a ways behind longtime incumbents like Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, which had 6.5 million uniques. The number for AOL’s Engadget, which Vox raided to create its editorial team, was 6.3 millon.

“The Verge is ‘very profitable’ and has sold out its advertising inventory for months, according to Chief Content Officer Marty Moe, who credits a ‘super premium experience’ for attracting large brands like Ford, BMW and Microsoft. The Verge is one of three sites where Vox Media has applied its strategy of choosing a news vertical and then hitting it hard with sizeable staffs of specialist writers and elaborate publishing tools. The company’s other properties are sports site SB Nation and newly launched video game site Polygon.”

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.