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Vox Media, on the hunt for new revenue streams, is exploring putting up a pay wall on The Verge
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- On The Verge of a Paywall
- Authors
- Oliver Darcy
- Word count
- 345 words
It seems like readers of The Verge would be highly motivated and capable of trying to avoid pay walls. Not sure why that brand in particular is being targeted for this
The Verge is run as and designed to be a destination webpage moreso than the rest of their properties. They even have a sort of Twitter clone for their own journalists to post to.
Honestly, I would immediately stop reading The Verge.
Respectfully to some of the more talented writers who have come and gone there and produced good, consequential journalism, 95% of their stories on a given day are low quality content chum that should be tweets. There’s nothing there worth paying for that isn’t already paywalled (their newsletters, etc).
I had to try really hard to stop myself from posting "Great! I hope this means I won't get linked to their crappy articles anymore". I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that way about them.
But I'd like to think that maybe going to a pay format would mean that they take the opposite approach as buzzfeed did and use this change to focus more on quality journalism.
I'd love it if they started focusing more on long form content. When they produce that type of article/video, it's generally pretty high quality.
There are plenty of other places that I can go to get quick regurgitations of rumors or press releases (Twitter and Mastodon are the ones that jump to mind immediately).
But I'm guessing those quick, disposable articles are where 95% of their traffic and social media shares come from, so I wouldn't hold my breath. I'd bet they'd keep those free and just paywall the longer articles.
I still check out The Verge but mostly to summarize current tech content. If there is something that is really interesting I usually end up searching for articles outside of The Verge.
Honestly, the thing I hate the most is how smug and cringy some of their writing is. Stuff like this article (https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/27/24255725/combing-an-electric-rv-with-a-range-extender-just-makes-sense) where for no reason they caption this under the photo of an Electric RV: "Thor Industries debuts the world’s first hybrid Class A motorhome. Too bad it’s ugly". It's smug, shitty, unwarranted, and even though aesthetic and design is a personal thing....I don't think it remotely looks bad. I like it.
Anyone have suggestions for tech sites these days? I don't need nitty gritty hyper-detailed breakdowns, just general 'tech news of the day'.
I use this as an aggregator of multiple sites' headlines
It's enough to get a zoomed out glimpse of what's going on
and then dive into anything that seems worth reading
https://skimfeed.com/
Congratulations, you've just shared your opinion. Just like the author of the post you linked did. Whether or not it's unwarranted or smug is up to the beholder in this case. I see nothing wrong with their saying it's ugly in the way they did. And this is one of their short form posts that are very informal and bloggy compared to their reviews, tech journalism or other regular posts. In these posts they will share more jokes, memes, quick thoughts and more with much less editorial integrity. It's a tech blog site on the Internet; smugness is the price of admission. I use the word smugness very lightly here. I don't get that vibe from The Verge at all myself.
I don’t remember the name of it, but several years ago there was an effort by some company to do a sort of platform-agnostic paywall for news based on individual articles. The exact details on it are fuzzy, but if I recall correctly, you would pay a fee and install an extension. That extension would then work on participating sites, letting the user read paywalled articles while allocating some of the subscription fee to that news site.
It was a neat idea, and I think The Verge was one of the participating sites at the time? I’m sad it didn’t take off. News desperately needs a way of monetizing, but readers also need an “under one roof” solution. Individually subscribing to different sites is a complete non-starter.
Scroll, I think. Acquired by Twitter Blue. I think it was Musk who removed the feature from Blue.
I think I liked the idea and if they've more sites that I read (such as Ars) I might have subscribed.
Scroll! That’s what it was. Thanks for identifying it.
Also, in looking it up, it seems my memory was faulty. Scroll wasn’t about passing paywalls; it was about blocking ads. If you had Scroll active, it wouldn’t display ads on partner sites and some of your subscription revenue would go to them when you visited them.
There's PressPatron.
https://www.presspatron.com
Decade or two ago there was Flattr or something similar to that, a tip button for websites.
The Verge has good long-form content sometimes. I dislike the colorful, busy, ultra-modern, glossy magazine design though. It's so excessive. It makes me nauseous.
It’s funny that the previous editor-in-chief left to head Bloomberg and redesigned that site in a way that most people hated and then years later The Verge does a redesign with a lot of the same loud and bold design cues that the Bloomberg one had.
That style might work on a monthly print magazine. Print is inherently pleasant, and after you read it you're done for the month. But a website like The Verge is meant to be visited every day. And on a computer screen those insanely bright colors are like knives in my eyes.
If you take off the bad choice of background color, it's not too terrible, IMHO.
The thing I really hate about The Verge and a few other sources is aside passages - where they copy a part of the article and copy it somewhere else in the text in giant font. It does so much to distract from the story!
The space-filling text extract.
Pull quotes. I never understood the point of them, even in print. If you need a graphic element to break up the text, throw in a little drawing like the New Yorker used to do.
I think it’s beautiful and I’m tired of pretending it’s not
The Verge is a remarkably popular website. I would assume that lots of people find it visually pleasant. Why did you feel compelled to pretend that you didn't?
a) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-tired-of-pretending-its-not
b) In the spaces I hang out, like Tildes, the overwhelming opinion is that the redesign is bad. I wanted to express the counter-opinion with some humour. I’ve never actually pretended 🙂
I frequent The Verge and sometimes engage in their comments section as there's some good discourse to be found on the odd article, but I skim their headlines through an RSS reader as their site design is too "loud" to navigate peacefully.
I would probably go elsewhere for my daily dose of tech and tech-adjacent reporting if a broad paywall ever went up. As it is already, the number of affiliate link articles masquerading as deals they've surfaced just for readers is getting to be a bit too much. I've felt the screws tightening, so to speak, so this article tracks with my experience.