The Verge is trying to shed its male-centered image

Lucia Moses of Digiday writes about how tech news site The Verge is trying to shed its image of being a site for men.

Moses writes, “When it was founded four years ago, The Verge drew an overwhelmingly male audience. It started adding entertainment, science and transportation coverage to broaden its audience and advertising base. It has also sharpened its approach to social media. All this has helped site traffic (up 4 percent to 13.1 million visitors in November, per comScore) and social audience (up 87 percent, says the Verge) in the past year. But the changes have helped the Verge with another goal of bringing more women to a historically dude-dominated category.

“The results include posts like this one on a women’s wearable bracelet (3,964 likes on Instagram) and this Kegel contraption, which let the Verge show its ‘technical expertise,’ as Havlak put it. (It should be noted, however, that the Verge isn’t alone in eyeing Kegel gadgetry, as this Techcrunch piece shows.)

“At first glance, the Verge still looks like some of its peers in terms of gender breakdown: The site’s traffic is 67 percent male, which is similar to Techcrunch, Gizmodo and Engadget. But the gender split is less pronounced than a year ago, when it was 79 percent male. The Verge is also reaching more women through female-centric social platforms, which aren’t reflected in site traffic.”

Read more here.