transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] 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 the 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 podcasts, and advertising. All kinds of questions you guys have been asking us about The Verge. I grabbed Helen Havlak, 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.

Speaker 2:
[01:17] We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retul. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets. Slack workflows and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retul comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retul actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud, with enterprise security built in. Go to retul.com/vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks, instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's ACID compliant, enterprise ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer, it's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com/build. Do that with Acrobat.

Speaker 1:
[03:06] 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. Hey, how's it going? And Helen Havlak, our publisher. We, 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.

Speaker 3:
[03:24] Thank you, David. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1:
[03:26] 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, we 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 gonna 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 wanna just describe what we've been trying to do with the new homepage?

Speaker 4:
[04:12] 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 gonna 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. Our redesign in 2020, 2021, we made the story stream on the homepage. Basically, the thesis was we should be able to tweet to our homepage. So we introduced Quickpost. Quickposts 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. We ran what looks like a social media feed. Our incredible product manager, Danielle, has been doing all these user surveys. 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. They leave comments and that's one experience. Then there's another huge set of people that just want to see the stories. They just want to see all the stories from the Apple event or what the top stories that we picked today are. Those ideas are in conflict. If you're looking at the old site, you would just experience that all the time. There's this thing that looks like a RevCron feed, there's following buttons, and then there's our top stories. Then I keep joking that Richard Waller, 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. That means people just ask them to do that all the time. This is just like we've lived with this for a long time. We've had this design for a long time. 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. 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. On the left is a more magazine situation. We're calling them story sets. 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. 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. We just have an ability to program our big fancy premium journalism all together and make things that feel like magazine covers, and let those live and breathe while the feed on the right gets to just pop along in real time as everyone's posting all day long. I think that's a little overdue, quite honestly. We had to figure out how exactly we want to pull things apart, but it's just the beginning because what I really want to do is have more feeds, and let you experience a verge that integrates with the open social web, and feels, I keep saying like a Tweet deck, 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.

Speaker 1:
[07:29] Helen, what's your angle on this? I think, is there a how do we make more money from the homepage question as part of this restructuring?

Speaker 3:
[07:38] 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 firehose of fast-turned 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 ad, 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. We ran a test, and they were getting 17 times more engagement than a banner ad. 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 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 media's 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.

Speaker 1:
[09:26] Okay. So in this, this actually brings us to, I think, our first question of the episode, which is about, I think if I'm, 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, can Verge 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. 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?

Speaker 3:
[10:07] Okay. I will answer the first part, which is Nilay famously does not give our writers many analytics. That's why I started laughing. Therefore, I can confirm that we are not pitting our writers against each other and who is the most followed. That being said-

Speaker 4:
[10:19] But we can start.

Speaker 1:
[10:20] Other than the giant screen in everyone's house that shows who is the most.

Speaker 3:
[10:25] Well, as Nilay has said, our ambition with the feed is to make it more social over time. 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 is the most followed writer at The Verge, and I'm not going to tell him. Sorry, David.

Speaker 1:
[10:42] I really like the idea of doing the sort of Apple style unmarked graphs, just showing like Liz Lopato went up 200 percent today.

Speaker 4:
[10:51] Cumulative subscriptions, they're just always going up, it's great.

Speaker 3:
[10:55] 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, as 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. There's a lot of people who depend on The Verge to just be the firehose 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 the fun stuff. That's what they're here for, and you have that consumer audience. I think in 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. A lot of people use The Verge for work. I think 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.

Speaker 4:
[12:24] Helen, do you want to have a digression into the future of responsive web design? Because I can do it right now.

Speaker 3:
[12:29] No, I don't, Nilay.

Speaker 4:
[12:31] 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 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.

Speaker 3:
[12:46] Yeah. The last thing I'll call out with follow features is, actually people are really using the automated email digest you could get once you set up your follow things. People are opening them to high rate. It's a new entry point for people to The Verge. 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.

Speaker 4:
[13:08] 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 Tweet Tech is because maybe all I actually want The Verge to be ever is a feed of cool gadgets that you can follow. 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's 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.

Speaker 1:
[13:45] So this is a fairly direct lead to the next question, which comes from, I believe it's Govind, who says, you've been public proponents of social internet protocols, especially at Proto. I would quibble with that, but whatever. Nilay said repeatedly that if The Verge were starting today, it would put up a blue sky server. He has also teased that more protocol based social and publishing features may be coming to theverge.com as soon as this year. I would love to know what the team at The Verge and 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 your current theory of the case about connecting The Verge to these broader open social protocols?

Speaker 4:
[14:27] Yeah. Let me start with why I say if we were starting The Verge, say we'd serve this guy's server. I think all great media brands grow up with their distribution. The Verge is just a good example. We started in 2011. We started a giant desktop website and phones didn't exist in the way that they exist now. 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. We don't have to do too much media theory, but I think that holds true. When I say if we were starting The Verge again today, what would we do? The exercise in my brain is what is the distribution that's on the way up that you would build a thing around? Maybe for the last five years, the answer has only been YouTube. Then there was a brief minute when the answer was TikTok. I just think it's hard to survive on those platforms. As we'll come to, I'm confident in this conversation. 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, Activity Hub 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 try to make our own way. We have, because these are all open protocols, that doesn't mean we can't also just do that now. And 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. A few years ago, it was Chorus. 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 here. 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.

Speaker 1:
[16:44] 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?

Speaker 4:
[16:56] I think for the way that Helen and I talk about it is, you can get some traffic and that's great, and you can't live or die in traffic, like the traffic can go away. 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. 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. Then the real goal is to turn the audience into a community, and we are very lucky that we have that too across platforms. So I just look at these open distribution protocols. I'm like, oh, this is how I can go get a bigger community. We're going to be where you are, and if you reply to us or like our posts or engage with us on Blue Sky or Threads or Mastodon, we'll get some value from that too. The people who are out on those platforms, we can curate that work in other ways. If I could retweet Casey once a week, I think that would be really valuable, and then our audience on our platform would see Casey's work and they could 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? No one wants to do that work. They just want to be like, here's this thing we saw that's great and 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.

Speaker 3:
[18:31] I can give you the ruthless business answer of why I'm interested.

Speaker 1:
[18:34] You're a theory of the case too.

Speaker 3:
[18:35] 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. They have moved away from that. They are no longer great discovery sources for us.

Speaker 1:
[18:51] Links in general even. Forget news, just links.

Speaker 3:
[18:54] 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? If you were to say like, what are three things that are excited about an open social web for us? We talked about QuickBooks ads on our website. They're objects that run in our feeds. If you could follow those feeds out in the world on whatever 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 that those feeds to X for free, and then they are going to sell ads and keep all the money. 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. The open social web is a lot more friendly to news. 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, our 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.

Speaker 4:
[20:39] Yeah, a couple of years from now, I would like it to be obvious that big algorithmic social platforms feel bad and The Verge feels good. But 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. 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 who are trying to hire on Helen's side, to 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.

Speaker 1:
[21:41] I like it. 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?

Speaker 3:
[22:08] I think if you look at, David, the economic model of The Verge 10 years ago, or any web business, 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 firehose of traffic to different webpages. People served advertising on those pages, and for a period of time, that scale was so big, and that advertising product was 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, 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, 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, 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 only reach The Verge that way. That has insulated us from some of this 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. It is a tricky inflection point to navigate, which is 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. That old economy is dead. We are entering a place where we are now balancing these two things of subscriptions and powering the core of the business and then advertising helping us grow.

Speaker 1:
[25:01] 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 in 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?

Speaker 3:
[25:33] 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. Then we have about the same amount of readers for 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 and younger, so I can't speak to that. But that does say a lot of our audience are actually pretty young. I think, why is that the case? I think you can look at several factors. The tech industry has been booming for a long time, but I think as you look at 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. Last time I looked at com score, I think The Verge's audience skewed about 10 years younger than CNETs. So some of it's also been in our approach to coverage how we surface content. So for example, 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. So I think within the tech cohort, we've managed to skew younger because we have voicey personalities who access feeds off platform in ways that young users are used to.

Speaker 1:
[27:18] We're talking about Nilay and me, who are both 23 and extremely youthful.

Speaker 3:
[27:21] You're both 23, but the more we clip you, the more ubiquitous you are on TikTok, David. That's true.

Speaker 1:
[27:27] I will say, 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 crumble into dust every time someone says this to us. I love to hear it and also we are hundreds of years old.

Speaker 4:
[27:46] 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.

Speaker 1:
[27:53] Yeah, I'm like, oh, we covered the thing that you made last week.

Speaker 4:
[27:56] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:
[27:57] And you were a literal child when we started doing this.

Speaker 4:
[28:00] By the way, the secret to this is not some business juice. We just hire cool people. That's the whole secret. You hire cool people and let them have a good time at work, especially in a creative industry. You're going to attract an audience of people who are looking for cool new things. Like I said, we don't do that much analytics in our history. That's the first time I've heard those numbers in ages too. And our strategy, insofar as we have a strategy, is we hired a bunch of cool people.

Speaker 3:
[28:27] The last thing I'll call it 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 wishlist.

Speaker 4:
[28:55] And I think that's where discounts are very important. 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 it's all a swirl in my head is, what's the thing that you start checking 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.

Speaker 1:
[29:22] 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.

Speaker 2:
[29:31] Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Miro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your.com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com/verge for 30 percent off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/verge for 30 percent off. framer.com/verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Grammarly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Grammarly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Grammarly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Grammarly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On Whatnot, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. They see what you've got, ask questions and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, Whatnot says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit whatnot.com/sell to start selling. That's whatnot.com/sell. whatnot.com/sell.

Speaker 1:
[32:56] All right, we're back. Let's play some voicemails that we got. This first one, then 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.

Speaker 5:
[33:09] 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, et cetera, 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.

Speaker 1:
[33:44] Do we really only have ads is such a perfect question about the internet. Helen, I'm curious for your take on this first.

Speaker 3:
[33:51] 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. You can have a big subscription-supported business. 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. We are, as I mentioned earlier, looking at, okay, how do 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.

Speaker 4:
[34:58] Yeah. 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. 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, everything else can come and go and we can build along the way. So that's that mix. I would actually just challenge that not everything is advertising. It's just internet stuff tends to advertise. There are no ad-supported plumbing companies. I wish there were. You know, it's 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. Video streaming, Hollywood streaming, is all kind of converging on one model. But Spotify isn't adding ads to its premium tier. 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 we can model. 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 five 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, see how it's gonna go. 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.

Speaker 3:
[37:12] 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.

Speaker 1:
[37:24] 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 people's appetites for internet subscriptions at this moment in time? Is that a real thing we're fighting as a business?

Speaker 3:
[37:47] 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. So TV and movie streaming, I think is a great example of, it's kind of a nightmare now to navigate where to watch even a sports game. 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. A lot of our subscribers, they're here for the utility, but they're also here because they love our journalists and they want to support the journalism. 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? 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 churn when the show's over.

Speaker 1:
[39:03] That is a really interesting way to frame actually a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about, that if we are up against a bunch of sub-stacks that you subscribe to and you have to debate between us and that, that's actually we're in trouble. The Verge has to go be a different thing than that in order to be worth it.

Speaker 4:
[39:21] Ideally, what we are is a community for people, and I don't mean that in the parasocial creator way, although I would love that. I have a book coming out next year, so if you could all buy that, that would be great. I mean that in a sense that our audience is a community. 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 in the comments on our TikTok. These are folks who interact with each other, who have a shared set of values, who are willing to disagree with each other politely. 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 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. I think you can really, we have a lot of big competitors that are effectively selling you links.

Speaker 3:
[40:12] 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, what makes the web bad today? What makes it harder to use and less fun than it used to be? 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. Of the good tech journalists, some are still on X, some have decamped to blue skies, some are on threats. What is the experience of accessing all of that? I think where The Verge also has an opportunity, 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 all of the content and experiences you want to have in one place so you don't have to go follow five different sub stacks, remember whether the people you like are on threads or blue sky or X, and you just get it all in one place.

Speaker 1:
[41:20] 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 the ones we have for the show. Let me play it for you.

Speaker 6:
[41:28] Hey, just listen 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 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 calorie 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, thanks, bye.

Speaker 1:
[42:16] You can see why I love this question.

Speaker 4:
[42:17] It's a good question.

Speaker 3:
[42:18] It's a great question.

Speaker 1:
[42:19] 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.

Speaker 4:
[42:30] 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, 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 of my yacht. But that day is not today. So that's my perspective on it. I'll let Helen actually answer the question.

Speaker 3:
[43:48] 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. 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, 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, 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. And so our challenge is, how do we satisfy our customers on the advertising side while also protecting the firewall of the journalism? And so Hype Test came from that point where we were saying, okay, if Nilay and David can't go try the new product and tell you it's great without compromising the newsroom, 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? 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. 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. And so Hype Desk is one of our experiments in inventing new ad formats. We've talked about Quickpost Ads is another place we are trying to invent ad products that perform better. And so the reality is we need to keep improving the ad products we make, as that industry changes, as the opportunity changes. And yeah, I wish we were buying Nilay yachts every year.

Speaker 1:
[46:40] So does Nilay. I can tell you for sure, Nilay wishes that.

Speaker 4:
[46:43] I've been working on that boat for 15 years, you guys. It's a paddle boat right now, but we have ideas.

Speaker 1:
[46:50] 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.

Speaker 4:
[46:56] And at the bottom is still me just paddling away.

Speaker 1:
[46:59] Helen, this is probably a useful moment to update on the episode we did 18 months ago. 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.

Speaker 3:
[47:17] 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, 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.

Speaker 1:
[47:38] Is that like display advertising on posts on our website?

Speaker 3:
[47:41] Increasingly our ad mix, and this was kind of always the case. 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. Programmatic is like you let Google serve whatever. There's a bidding marketplace, things show up across any website. That is a lower, that pays out at lower rates.

Speaker 1:
[48:08] But that was the Google promise, right? Like if you rewrite until 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.

Speaker 3:
[48:23] 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 fancier, nicer, better performing banner ads 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. 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 a hype desk on The Vergecast or quick post ads or branded content or events we do together. And so you see the kinds of advertising mix writ large like moving off display into more integrated deals.

Speaker 4:
[49:31] I can't believe I have to do this because we never have to do this disclosure, but I have to do it. Our business, Vox Media, is suing Google 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.

Speaker 1:
[49:49] That might be the first time we've ever had to do that on the show.

Speaker 4:
[49:51] It never comes up, but there it is.

Speaker 1:
[49:54] It's pretty good. Disclosure is our brand. I think we have one more business flash editorial question before... Helen, we're going to boot you out of here, and Nilay and I are going to do some other stuff. This is specifically about podcasts and audio and video. You'll see why this is a good transition for a bunch of stuff here. Let me just play this for you.

Speaker 7:
[50:16] I love your audio podcast. I love audio podcasts in general. I don't think there is 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. You can pop in the 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 fills for the older generations. 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. Not everything needs to be watched.

Speaker 1:
[50:58] Basically, I think this is very much equally an editorial and a business question, but I do think we've gotten a lot of versions of this question about, how do podcasts make money? Is the recent push to video fundamentally a push about how to make more money from podcasts? 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. I want to know your thoughts on how you're looking at podcasts as a business and especially how video changes or adds to or subtracts from that.

Speaker 7:
[51:33] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[51:34] I will say personally, I prefer audio podcasts too. They fit better into my life. That's how I like to listen to things. 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 audio podcasts are pretty high-performing. 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. 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 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. But no one solved the podcast discovery problem. It is true that while the audio listeners have the thing they want and love, there is a new listener that is consuming podcasts as video products. If you look at YouTube is now the biggest podcast player in the world. There is a lot of new people who like listening to or watching podcasts in a new form. To reach those people, we have to have video versions of our podcasts and good products that work on those platforms. I would say it is more about accessing new audience, bringing new people into our shows and getting them familiar with our talent. 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 an immediate swarm of 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, because it is hard to grow audio-only feeds, 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.

Speaker 1:
[53:33] Another version of this question we got from Angel, I believe it is, was asking essentially about this in the context of even companies like Netflix, getting into podcasts and getting into advertising. 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. If you just look at the pivot to podcasts in general, is it as simple as that? It's pretty cheap to make most podcasts compared to even a 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. Do you see that happening broadly here?

Speaker 3:
[54:20] 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. You look at what is winning on YouTube right now, it's like YouTube is either going super long or it's going super short. The heydays of 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. 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? I think increasingly, if things are overproduced, you're seeing 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. That actually, I think is part of the audience connection, is a more casual, authentic aesthetic on these long video shows. I think it's both about what are the users doing and where is the money going to go. The money follows the users.

Speaker 1:
[55:31] Yeah, that makes sense. All right, we have actually, Nilay, 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 gonna release you back to go, do more things to make us money, which is- Go make money. Yeah, go make us money.

Speaker 3:
[55:45] Thank you so much for having me. I obviously love The Verge. I guess, David, I will ask myself a question. How can the listeners of this podcast most support The Verge? If we are not going to take our continued existence for granted.

Speaker 1:
[56:00] 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?

Speaker 3:
[56:16] 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. If you are paying to subscribe, you are allowed to listen to the ad-free podcast feed. We love you, it's cool.

Speaker 4:
[56:36] The thing that we sell you, you can use it.

Speaker 1:
[56:37] It's allowed, yes.

Speaker 3:
[56:39] I give you moral permission to use the ad-free podcasts that are part of your subscription.

Speaker 1:
[56:43] This is a real thing though. We used to get people who would ask if they should feel bad watching the podcast on YouTube when with YouTube premium, when it wasn't showing ads, like, should I be listening?

Speaker 3:
[56:53] Yeah, like, spend time with us. I'll give you two more things you can do to support The Verge. One is, you know, we've talked a lot about on this episode about discovery, how you find new people. So, I don't know, share The Verge. Tell people you love it. Share the content you love from here. Bring new people into The Verge. That is a really fantastic way to support us. And then as Nilay said, you know, when we did the new homepage design, we're talking to people directly about what they want to see from us. So give us your feedback. What do you want to hear from us? What do you want to see from us? What's working? What's not? We actually pay a lot of attention to direct feedback from all of you. So subscribe to The Verge. If you can't subscribe to The Verge, it is okay. But tell your friends, send us your feedback. Love it.

Speaker 1:
[57:36] All right. Helen, thank you. We're going to take a break. And then Nilay, I got some more stuff for you. We'll be right back.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 8:
[59:51] Whoa. Okay. This one says you get a free phone if you switch. Hey, this one also says you get a free phone if you switch.

Speaker 9:
[59:59] Yeah, they all do one.

Speaker 8:
[60:01] Wait, wait, wait, wait. The T-Mobile one says families saved over $3,700 versus the other big guys in the past five years. And their experience plans have Netflix included, plus the year of Dash passed by DoorDash.

Speaker 10:
[60:14] Hang on. Let me see that. And a five-year price guarantee? Oh yeah, we're switching.

Speaker 8:
[60:19] That's what I'm talking about. Do we clap now or?

Speaker 10:
[60:22] I'm thinking high five. At T-Mobile, get savings that keep stacking up.

Speaker 11:
[60:27] That's value you can feel every day.

Speaker 10:
[60:29] Switch now at T-Mobile. Savings based on HarrisX billing snapshots from Q3 2021 to Q4 2025 among accounts with three plus voice lines compared to AT&T and Verizon. Excluding discounts, credits and optional charges. See harrisx.com/t-mobile. Price guarantee on talk, text and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See tmobile.com.

Speaker 1:
[60:54] All right, we're back. So Nilay, while we're on the subject of video, I have a voicemail I want to play you that I think is representative of a question you and I have both been getting for a very long time. So let's hear that.

Speaker 11:
[61:07] Hey there, David and The Vergecast team. Long time listener here, and I'm calling from Austria, Europe, and asking regarding the whole Verge episode about what's happening regarding Verge and the history of The Verge and stuff like this. To be honest, I wanted to know, back in the day that was on The Verge, like with the old Verge crew, and this was a little bit more produced, will that ever be coming back? Such a highly produced YouTube show basically, and yeah, would be nice, I think, getting something like this back now that everything is moving back to video again. And yeah, love the show, love to be a subscriber and supporting what you do, and keep up the good work. Thank you, bye.

Speaker 1:
[62:05] Okay, I both want you to answer this specific question directly about On The Verge, which is a show a lot of people liked and have feelings about, but also there is a sort of style of old Verge videos that we get asked about a lot, that we just don't do as much anymore, and people consistently want to know why not, are we going to bring that back? What happens to kind of that era of early Verge video? Curious.

Speaker 4:
[62:32] Sure. One, we should definitely bring Josh back to host a talk show. He was very good at it.

Speaker 1:
[62:39] He was really good at it.

Speaker 4:
[62:40] It was very fun to make that show. That show was both possible because all of us were young and most of us didn't have children. We ran the whole website and then also produced the show underneath it. No one slept. The nights after On the Verge, we would all go to, we always went to the same French restaurant and we would just sit and drink and shoot the shit. Some of the most fun, maybe in the entire history of The Verge, that anyone has ever had. I think we're all older now and none of us can do that. This is all leading me up to say, the cost structure of making that video in a time when there isn't just venture capital money sloshing around digital media to subsidize everything. When YouTube had signed a deal with Vox Media back then to subsidize a bunch of video, all that stuff is expensive to make. That's all I'm getting at. You have to hire really talented people. You're basically doing tiny little documentary productions, even for things like fancy review videos. We just had a lot of people working on them all the time. And not to just keep harping on this, the monetization of the video platforms in general has moved to direct brand integrations. So unless we are going to be a little ad agency and make the ads for the brands and then give the brands approval over the videos, that I don't think there's a way to make the money at the scale to support that work. We're trying to invent some stuff. This is why Helen is talking about hype test. We're trying to go address that market and get those dollars and maybe it'll work and maybe it won't. I hope it does. But I look at the creator landscape, and it's only the big players that can afford to do that work because they're doing massive brand deals. I just keep saying, there's just money we won't make.

Speaker 1:
[64:29] I actually think that may be the most direct version of that thing. To do the kind of stuff we want to do. I think outside of all of this stuff, you and I both share the ambition to do that stuff. I loved that stuff. I loved making it.

Speaker 4:
[64:44] It was really fun.

Speaker 1:
[64:45] I loved watching it. There is really only one way to make money from that on the Internet and is to do the brand deals we're not willing to do.

Speaker 4:
[64:54] Yeah. That's as blunt. I tried not to just say it.

Speaker 1:
[64:59] I mean, it's just true.

Speaker 4:
[65:00] But because again, I just want to, I tried not to say it as bluntly as that. I know it's true.

Speaker 1:
[65:06] It's hard to say there aren't other possible ways, but as it stands right now, it feels like the only way.

Speaker 4:
[65:11] Yeah, you can't do it. I just never try to throw shade at the creators. We're friends with a lot of them. I think they all do a lot of really good work. There's a thing that they do that we won't do. That's fine. It's so hard to run that business. I have nothing but sympathy for those folks because I know how hard it is.

Speaker 1:
[65:30] Yeah, don't begrudge anybody their work there.

Speaker 4:
[65:33] And that's just a compromise we're not willing to make because of the kind of product we make and our ethics policy and all this other stuff. And more power to them. Go figure it out. But I don't think you can support that work on the platforms as they are constructed today without compromising our ethics policy. And that is bad. I think that's bad. I don't think that's the creator economy's fault. I think that is the platform's fault. We come at it sideways a lot, but I'll just say it clearly. It is criminal that YouTube cannot pay high enough rates to support actual journalism that does not have integrated brand deals. And something is wrong there. It's criminal for TikTok and Instagram, too. But they know that there's an army of teenagers who will work for free. And they don't have to do it because if you get mad and leave, you will be replaced. And that's the whole thing, the whole conversation we had with Helen about wanting to be diversified and direct. That is the thing that I'm always the most paranoid about. I do not want to be tied to distribution that has that much leverage over me. And especially because we cover these companies. But anyway, that's the story. We were flush with VC cash and dumb advertising money. The brands that were showing up at that time all had these things called experimental budgets because they didn't know how to advertise on the internet. And they're like, Ford showed up and was like, Josh, you can give away a car. That was a real thing that happened on The Verge. Those experimental budgets are long gone. Everything is tracked to an inch of performance. It's just not how it's going anymore. I hope maybe those days will come back. In the meantime, I think it is better for us to make sustainable journalism.

Speaker 1:
[67:08] Yeah. And I think, again, it is important to say we loved doing that thing.

Speaker 4:
[67:11] It was so much fun.

Speaker 1:
[67:12] It was so fun. And we continue to look for every available opportunity to do it, even when it is not the most financially sound decision we've ever made. I think we did a thing last summer with Will Poor, where they did this big journey on the hydrogen highway in California that was big and expensive, and we had to get really creative about where we put it, and all the stuff that we made. And my hope is to continue to do more of that stuff and find ways to do big, expensive, weird things.

Speaker 4:
[67:46] But that's all related to why are you trying to monetize so much stuff? You need something that throws off a lot of cash, that is very profitable, so you can do the things that are not quite so profitable. It's like the Hollywood actors are like, one for the studios and one for me. We need that dynamic across our newsroom, and hopefully we'll get back there.

Speaker 6:
[68:04] Totally.

Speaker 1:
[68:05] All right. Actually, on that front, we got a question about some Verge alumni. So let me play that for you.

Speaker 6:
[68:11] Hey, my name is Stefan. I'm calling about the upcoming episode about The Vergecast. So it sounds like through listening to you guys for a very long time that you guys have a pretty good relationship with your alumni, a lot of them, you're proud of them when they move on to do other things. But The Vergecast is different in that people are in your ear and they become, I don't know, they feel like friends and then they leave and it's weird and it feels bad and then you don't know what happens to them. Can you or will you ever talk about how your relationships with alumni are? What are they doing? You know, I don't want to know what happened. I'm sure you guys don't talk about that. But like Alex, Paul, Dieter, what's it like? Do you talk to them? Are they happy? Is it good? I don't know. I just want to know about how these people are doing. That, you know, it used to be in my ear every week and I miss them. Anyways, thanks, bye.

Speaker 1:
[69:10] This question made me so happy.

Speaker 4:
[69:12] I talked to Dieter for a while last night, actually.

Speaker 1:
[69:14] Did you?

Speaker 4:
[69:15] Yeah. Dieter and I, you know, Dieter works at Google. We do not talk about work. And that took us a while to figure because we only talked about work for a long time. We had to learn how to not talk about work. Yeah. We just chatted about family. It was great. Dieter is great. He's very available on the Internet.

Speaker 1:
[69:36] You can find Dieter.

Speaker 4:
[69:37] Ask him on Android. He'll be fine. Alex is, I think, writing for Giz. Paul, you know, as Paul wants to do, left the Internet. Last time I saw Paul was on the street of Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest, gave him a big hug. I hope all these people are happy. I am very proud of our alumni. I think as you all know, I always make the Hotel California joke, you can check out, you never leave. We don't even call them alumni, we call them expats. They come back, they're on our shows, maybe we won't promote them as much. But they participate, we love to support their work out in the world. But not everyone can work at every job forever. You know, I'll use Casey Newton as an example. Platformer is amazing. He has built a good business that does meaningful coverage for the community he serves. He's, you know, hard work has been built into a new kind of thing that I think is really important. We were probably just a cap on Casey's ambition when he had all those ideas. And I don't ever want to be a cap on anybody's ambition. So I'm happy that Casey, like, it's better, it's better to not be Casey's boss, is what I will say. It's much more fun to just be Casey's friend. So, like, that's how I see it. It's like, we should give people room to have the biggest ideas they can. The Verge is a pretty creative place. Like, there's a lot of creative freedom here. And then when they reach the limit, when they feel like we're getting in their way, all we should do is support them on whatever thing they do next.

Speaker 1:
[71:02] Yeah. I mean, I think from the very beginning, it was like a verge policy to like, be happy for people who leave the verge to go do other cool things. We have occasionally tried to talk people out of leaving to go do less cool things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I think in general, like, my, I mean, as someone who left and came back, right, like my ongoing career advice to most people is like everybody should have lots of jobs. And with that comes, like, don't hold on to anything too tightly. And on the flip side, like, don't hold on to anyone too tightly, right? Like there are seasons it makes sense and seasons it doesn't. And I think the fact that, like, there are a hundred people who used to work here that I can just call and be like, hey, come on The Vergecast and talk to me about this thing. And they're like psyched to come back. Like I think about the Sean O'Kane came on the first season of Version History. He was like the first non-staffer we had on Version History. Sean O'Kane, I hired as an intern 400 years ago because he loved his Pebble watch. Like that was the thing that got Sean the job. And he's gone on to great stuff. He's now at TechCrunch doing really interesting, important reporting. And he came back and had this like cool moment being back in the office and then left and went back to his job at TechCrunch. I was like, this is awesome. Like it's great that we all get to be friends like this. This industry is so small. There's only 50 of us. There's just not that many people who do this and we all know each other and it is like more fun that we're all friends. I think people generally don't realize how fun it is that we're all friends.

Speaker 4:
[72:28] I can't say this enough. I do not aspire to be everyone's boss forever. If I could be no one's boss, I think I would be happiest. Yes, there are people that you probably miss. We can only be so big. We can only have so many people. We can only pay so many people. Some people, when they graduate and they move on, that makes space for other new people. It's funny, people make the list of folks and it's like, it always starts with Dieter and Becca. And it's like, well, those, they overlapped, but also they spent quite a lot of time. When Dieter left, there was space for Becca to fill on our channel, right? And that's important. Becca's got her channel now, she's doing great. She's taking tech outside. That's tech. I love watching her on camera videos. They're great.

Speaker 11:
[73:13] Hers looks great, yeah.

Speaker 4:
[73:14] So I hope people see that dynamic too. We try to make space for our new folks, because that's also important that we are a place where people develop into the kind of personalities and develop the kinds of audience that let them go do whatever next thing they want to do.

Speaker 1:
[73:28] Totally. All right, we have a few more here that we're just gonna burn through them fast. We have to do a Brendan Carr question. So here's our Brendan Carr question.

Speaker 6:
[73:38] Hi, my name is Chris. I'm calling from an IKEA. I'm hoping you can't hear the background music too loud. I wanted to ask, why is the segment called Brendan Carr is a dummy? I know you've talked about, you chose the word dummy very specifically, but we'd love to hear you justify it, because there are many other words I can imagine using, and that seems like a pretty innocuous one to land on ultimately. Yeah, let me know what you think.

Speaker 1:
[73:59] He's such a dummy, Nilay.

Speaker 4:
[74:01] I have a lot of thoughts about this.

Speaker 1:
[74:02] Why is he a dummy?

Speaker 4:
[74:03] Well, he is a dummy. I think it is important not to let bad actors feel like they have outsmarted everyone, and Brendan thinks he is very smart. If you listen to the segment, America's Favorite Podcast and the Podcast, you will understand that actually he is quite stupid. I just think there's something de-fanging and important about calling stupid people stupid. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Speaker 1:
[74:28] So you think giving him some more malicious nickname almost gives him too much credit?

Speaker 4:
[74:35] Yeah. He's an idiot.

Speaker 1:
[74:36] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[74:36] Brendan Carr is an evil genius is not actually the vibe. Brendan Carr has once again stumbled into a First Amendment disaster is more the vibe.

Speaker 9:
[74:44] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[74:44] Okay. I buy it.

Speaker 4:
[74:46] Look, we get this feedback a lot, but the reason it's a dummy is so that he understands that I think he's stupid.

Speaker 9:
[74:52] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[74:53] Okay. Next question. This comes from Rufo. The question is, how many jackets does Nilay have and does he ever get hot wearing them while recording?

Speaker 4:
[75:01] I went to the experts for this one, David. Hey, Beck, how many jackets do you think I have?

Speaker 6:
[75:07] About 137, but only three look different than the others.

Speaker 4:
[75:12] It's brutal. It's brutal.

Speaker 1:
[75:15] So 137, but also four.

Speaker 4:
[75:20] Becky is like a cleaner. She's like, throw this stuff away. We have effectively three closets in our house. There's our closet, then there's the front closet, and there's a back coat zone. All of them are just full of black jackets. She's like, what are these? Get rid of them. Then I look at them like, but these are all slightly different denim jackets. She's like, no, they're not. We probably had that conversation. I'm just lucky she didn't make a video where she just toured the closets for a little bit of nickel jackets. My argument is I'm on camera all the time and I need to be wearing different clothes.

Speaker 1:
[75:56] But only very slightly different.

Speaker 4:
[75:58] That's why I got shamed into wearing this jacket on this show because I went and recorded that with her, and I was like, crap.

Speaker 1:
[76:04] Love it. All right, two more, and then we're gonna get out of here. Here is one about social media, which is just a, we're gonna do this really fast. It's gonna be great. Here we go.

Speaker 11:
[76:14] Hi, Vergecast friends. This is Cody from Oklahoma. I went to school for journalism, but I'm kind of curious what it's like now in 2026, because I've actually never worked in it. When you're using social media as members of the show, do you feel a need to not block people? How do you handle social media as content creators in 2026?

Speaker 1:
[76:40] Like I said, super small picture question. Not a lot of things to feel about this one.

Speaker 4:
[76:43] The last question, we're like 90 minutes in.

Speaker 1:
[76:46] I do think the question of how, this is a thing you and I talk about a lot. So I'm curious how you're thinking about it right now, which is what do you feel like you are sort of required to be on social media as a journalist in 2026, which I think is what this person is asking. Not how do you use it, but who do you have to be on these platforms?

Speaker 4:
[77:06] Yeah, I don't know. And it's actually, not to continually talk about the book that I'm putting out next year.

Speaker 1:
[77:13] How to Get What You Want by Nilay Patel. Tell people the name, man, come on.

Speaker 4:
[77:16] I'm trying not to make it too, we got to save all the promo juice when there's actually something you can buy. The pre-orders name in Live Day, but we've announced the book. It's a book about, it's just decoder stuff. It'll be fun. When you go to sell a book, they look at your social following. It's almost like a formula. If you have enough Twitter followers, you can get a book deal. That's a thing you can do. And I showed up and had this pitch about, I've talked to all these CEOs and I think there's a lot to learn about structure and blah, blah, blah. And they're like, how many Twitter followers? It was like very, it was just like one of those things that you put in the proposal. It's like, oh, this is a business plan. This isn't just a book proposal. And part of the business plan is, how big is your social following so that you can distribute to an audience of people that might want to actually see this book. And I totally understand it and it is totally rational. And it's also like, oh boy, these platforms are marketing platforms. That's what they are. That's how everybody perceives them, except for the handful of us that came up with them a different way. So I'm maybe just in the middle of a full existential crisis about that. I also think it is important to play the games the platforms are designed to make you play, right? Like being stubbornly anti-algorithmic media when you're trying to grow an Instagram following is just, you're just going to waste your time. So I'm trying to find the balance in between all of these things. I also think it's important that we reach our audiences there and tell them about The Verge and that it's a good product that they should try. I don't know, where are you at?

Speaker 1:
[78:41] I've had a slightly different run, which is that I almost entirely stopped actively posting on social media for a while, and I was still around, I read tweets, I looked at threads, whatever, but I didn't post very much for a long time because it just felt bad. I was like, I'm just not having a good time here. I will keep looking for reporting reasons to make sure I understand what's going on. I have tried to engage more recently and have mostly enjoyed it, I would say. But I think one thing I do feel very responsible for is like, you and I always joke that we are the customer service line for The Verge, and that's actually a thing I take really seriously and is a thing we do on social a lot, is like, I think The Verge is a big brand that is fundamentally just like a bunch of doofuses in Slack trying to make things together. And I think it matters to me to be real people representing this thing that like, everyone should remember that we are just like a bunch of people trying our hardest, and that is what we do all day. And so I think I spend a lot of time answering people's tweets about why a web page is broken. And I think to me, that's actually the great use of social media is to just sort of respond to people as they engage with the stuff that I and we make. And email is one version of that that works, and I get a lot of emails and I try to respond to as many of them as I can. I have been worse at email recently as I've gotten better at social media recently. But being out there and engaging both sort of as me and also on behalf of this bigger thing that we make, I think is very important and probably very useful. I will say I do not at all feel bad blocking people. Like if you are an ass on the internet, you do not get to engage with me. And I think I spend a lot of time both as a reporter and just as a person. Like I will engage with almost anyone who is operating in good faith about almost anything. You can say the cruelest, most cutting thing to me and if you are earnest and in good faith, I will take you seriously. And if you are just in bad faith, I don't have time for you and neither should anybody else.

Speaker 4:
[80:52] You've done a very good job of curating that audience. I will actually, I will reveal to the listeners that our first little federation experiment is going to be to federate David's.

Speaker 1:
[81:01] Oh yeah, that's right.

Speaker 4:
[81:02] Post feed. We're going to like work on that and figure that out. And one of the reasons we're like, it should just start with David, like a very controlled experiment. And it's because David's audience is well behaved. Like that will just be a group of happy people who are like, look at this fun experiment as opposed to like me, which is like, let's fight. And that's just like a very different vibe.

Speaker 1:
[81:24] I do think you are slightly easier to trigger to saying cutting things on the internet than I am. And it has probably served me well over time.

Speaker 4:
[81:33] I like to fight and it's a real problem and I'm working on it every day.

Speaker 1:
[81:36] I have just fully leaned into like kill them with kindness or block them and move on. Right, like those are the only two moves I have found that make me feel good and that's it. And I will keep doing that. And everyone, no one should feel one second of guilt blocking some of the internet. You just shouldn't like.

Speaker 4:
[81:53] No, I don't either.

Speaker 1:
[81:54] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[81:55] But I'm much more open to, let's disagree more loudly. You know, you can just see I'm working on it everybody.

Speaker 1:
[82:03] It's good, I like this for you. All right, we have one last question. And this is specifically designed to make you, Nilay Patel, both think very hard and feel very old.

Speaker 9:
[82:13] Here we go. Hi, I'm Jonathan and I'm a huge fan of the show. And I heard that you are doing The Vergecast questions. And here's a question for Nilay. So Nilay, you've been gadget blogging since the beginning of gadget blogging. How do you think both the gadgets and how we write and talk about those gadgets has changed over the years? Thanks so much.

Speaker 1:
[82:46] Nilay just crumbled into dust, everyone.

Speaker 4:
[82:48] Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:
[82:51] I love it.

Speaker 4:
[82:52] I'm trying not to die. As your local Gandalf. That's a really good question. I actually really appreciate that question. I won't overdo it, but here's my grand unified theory of gadgets. Before the iPhone, the whole industry was chasing this concept called convergence, where you would just make everything a computer, and Bill Gates would show up at CS every year and talk. Every year, he would talk about putting a PC in your living room, because the holy grail of convergence was making your TV a computer, in particular, a Windows computer. That's why the Xbox exists. You just saw everyone was trying to make everything into a computer, and it didn't quite work. So you just had this huge ecosystem explosion of gadgets, because everything needed to do a different job. The idea of convergence was that you could get one thing to do every job. Seriously, the industry just chased this dream for ages upon ages upon ages. But before the phone, it never worked. Bill Gates was never successful at putting a PC under your TV. They are trying to this day, and they can't get it done. So there was just this massive explosion of gadgets. Then the iPhone came out, and then everything became an app, and then everything became software. The idea that you needed a different piece of hardware to do a different job just utterly fell by the wayside, and everything became a little accessory to an iPhone. That is like coming and going, right? Like it comes and goes. I'm always like, gadgets are back, and sometimes they are, and then everything turns into iPhone apps again, and a big consumer base is in apps. So all of the people with all the ideas about how to solve one little problem that 15 years ago would have been a gadget, are now making apps, and often subscription apps, and you just see, that's not as much fun as it used to be. I do think there are interesting gadgets. I think a couple of weeks ago I mentioned, we bought my daughter a cricket cutting machine for her birthday. That is the most fun gadget we've bought in ages in this house, and we have made so many stickers. Do not buy a cricket for your eight-year-old daughter unless you are ready for just thousands upon thousands of stickers to be manufactured in your kitchen. But that stuff exists, it's just not the way it was before. Now, because these companies have all gotten so big and so powerful, it's impossible to just talk about gadgets without also talking about money and power and politics. I understand why that is really tiresome for a lot of people. But it is also true that you cannot talk about the next iPhone without talking about the price of RAM, which means you're talking about war, which means you're talking about tariffs. I think we try to draw the line, but that is the big new change. At least from my perspective is these companies used to be small. They were not the most powerful companies in the world. Not everything was converged into smartphones. The way we talked about it was a lot lighter. It was enthusiasts doing enthusiasts stuff. I sent David a 1988 copy of Macworld the other day, like a PDF of an old Macworld the other day. You look at the ads of that issue of Macworld and it's like, carrying cases, disk drives, optical disk drives, carrying cases for your disk drives. Everything around a computer was a piece of hardware or an accessory. None of it had landed in this perfect form factor of the smartphone. I would love to get some of the ecosystem back. I suspect we won't get it back. But finding the things that are small and interesting and fun, I think that's what everyone is missing. I think that it sounds like you're very young. It sounds like you're curious about that vibe in a way that being curious about the past is really fun. Finding the next version of that, I think, is on my mind. That's why I want to feed it gadgets. Because I understand what that felt like and I miss it too.

Speaker 9:
[86:55] Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 1:
[86:56] All right, I think that's a perfect place to end. Nilay, thank you for hanging out. Thank you to everybody who sent us questions. As always, if you have more questions about The Verge and The Vergecast and how we make money, send them along. We'll do some of them on the show. We can just answer them however we can. Come at me on social media, but only in a nice way. Otherwise, I'll block you and I won't feel bad about it at all. Nilay, thanks for doing this with me. This was really fun.

Speaker 4:
[87:18] That was really fun. Helen was great. We should just let Helen host the show.

Speaker 1:
[87:21] That's honestly. It would be great. I'm into it. Thanks, buddy. That's it for the show. Thank you to Nilay and Helen for doing this with me, and thank you as always for watching and listening, and thank you for sending questions. It's very fun to get to get inside baseball in this way. This is like the stuff we talk about at work all the time. It's fun to get to do it in this more public setting. Thank you to everybody who called and emailed and sent me notes on signal. Keep it all coming. The hotline as always 866-VERGE-1-1, the email vergecast.theverge.com, send us all of your thoughts and feelings and questions about absolutely everything. This show is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. I will be back with Nilay on Friday to talk about the news. There's a lot of developer season stuff starting to heat up. There's a lot of AI chaos because there is always AI chaos, and presumably Brendan Carr will be up to stuff too. We'll see you then.