The Vergecast Vergecast, part two

In short

Podcast Summary: The Vergecast - Part Two

Episode Overview

Title: The Vergecast, Part Two
Hosts: Nilay Patel and David Pierce
Guests: Helen Havlak (Publisher)
Release Date: Not specified in the transcript

Description In this episode, the hosts discuss questions and feedback from their audience regarding The Verge's recent subscription launch. Topics include subscription pricing, ad-free podcasting, the impact of Apple News, and the overall business model of digital media.

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Key Themes and Discussions

The Launch of The Verge Subscription
Context: The Verge launched a subscription service to adapt to changing business models in digital media.
Pricing Strategy: The subscription is priced at $7/month or $50/year, aimed to be accessible for most users.
Rationale for Subscription:
Decreasing dependency on ad revenue due to changing advertising landscape.
Need for a loyal audience that directly supports the publication.

Challenges with Ad-Free Content
Audience Questions: Many listeners are interested in ad-free podcast options.
Response: The hosts explain the business realities of maintaining ad revenue while considering user experience.
Ad Business: Ad revenue remains vital for The Verge's operations, and switching to an ad-free model could jeopardize that relationship.

The Role of Apple News
Visibility: The Verge’s presence on Apple News has shifted from free content to a subscription model.
User Guidance: Users are encouraged to subscribe directly to The Verge instead of relying on third-party platforms like Apple News.

Business Integrity and Journalism
Transparency: The hosts discuss maintaining a firewall between editorial content and advertising to preserve journalistic integrity.
Personal Experiences: David shares perspectives on how ad reads are handled, highlighting the balance between sponsorship and editorial standards.

Evolving Content Strategies
Meta Show: The episode serves as a meta-analysis of The Verge's operations and listener engagement.
Future Content Plans: Discussion revolving around the potential for print editions and the importance of maintaining a robust online presence.

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Key Takeaways

Audience Engagement: Listener participation is crucial for shaping The Verge's direction, with encouragement for feedback and questions.
Business Model Evolution: The Verge is adapting its business model in response to industry changes, emphasizing subscription services alongside traditional advertising.
Transparent Practices: The commitment to maintaining clear lines between editorial integrity and advertising relationships is essential for credibility.

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Conclusion The episode emphasizes the ongoing challenges faced by media companies in the digital landscape, the importance of audience support, and the balance required to maintain quality journalism while adapting to new business models. The Verge aims to continue evolving while staying true to its core values.

Listeners are encouraged to engage with the hosts and share their thoughts on the future of The Verge.

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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:03Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Inside Baseball. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am outside for the first time in kind of an alarmingly long time. I was sick most of last week. Plus, it's just like gray and dreary and cold and just gross outside. So I've mostly spent the last week just kind of lying on the couch, feeling bad for myself and watching shows I've seen 50 times before. Which, no complaints. It's a terrific way to spend your life. But I just needed to get outside. So we're just out for a walk. By the way, I've gotten some questions from people over the last couple of weeks who are like, David, what are you doing during these intros?

0:37Are you actually doing these things or are you like lying to us? And the answer is I'm always doing these things. I've done these intros from a train. I've done these intros from a paint shop. I've done them while putting together Legos. I did one at one point like in a courthouse and I don't think I was supposed to do that. I don't think I got in trouble but probably not a good idea. But I'm here for you. The other question I've gotten a bunch is, David, why do you start the show this way? Nobody cares. Just get to the tech news. And to that, I say, that is terrific feedback and a perfectly fair point.

1:10It's also probably not going to change. So I'm real sorry about that. Questions like that, by the way, are all we're going to do on this show today. We've gotten a lot of questions over the last week, especially since we launched our subscription last week about The Verge and about The Verge cast and about ads and about how the media works and about how podcasts work. And so we figured we just answer as many of them as we can all in one place. We're going to talk to Helen Havlak, our publisher, and Nelai Patel, my co-host, your friend, my boss, about all of this stuff. The business, the editorial, how we think about what we make and who we make it for and how we charge for it, all this stuff.

1:45I think this stuff really matters. It's going to get really wonky and detailed at some points, and if you're not interested in deep thoughts on the future of media, there might be spots here that aren't for you, but I think this stuff really matters, And it's a story about the internet and about what it means to try and make it work. We're going through a lot of this stuff, but we're far from the only ones going through it. So I think talking through what it looks like and how we're navigating it might actually be interesting. We're going to find out. All that is coming up in just a second. But first, I'm not done on this walk.

2:14It feels good to be outside. I forgot how good it feels to be outside. So we're going to keep doing it. Then we'll get to it. This is The Verge Gas. See you in a sec.

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4:14Let's just get into it. We're going to do this in two chunks. First, we're going to talk to Helen Havlack about some of the more sort of explicitly businessy things about The Verge and The Verge cast. I think as you've heard us talk a lot about on this show, we try really hard to keep those two things as far apart as possible. So Helen is going to talk to us about as much of the money as we possibly can. Then Neelai is going to come on and we're going to talk, I would say, more broadly about how we make the show and how we make The Verge and how we think about all of this stuff. There's going to be some overlaps, I suspect, between these two segments because Neelai and Helen are both tasked with thinking kind of big picture about The Verge at all times.

4:54But It felt useful to pull these two things apart. So first, we're going to talk to Helen. We got some questions, including the number one by a mile question that you all had about The Verge and The Vergecast for this meta show. So let's just dive into it. Helen Havlack, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. Excited to be here. It's been a minute. I feel like you're allowed to invite yourself on anytime. So I assume the fact that it's been a while just means that you don't want to be here ever. And I have dragged you here against your will. I'm just an invisible presence behind The Verge that's been here for 10 years and is in everyone's DMs, but rarely appears in public.

5:29Is it 10 years now? It was 10 years in November, David. My Helen origin story is that you and I ran CES together one year right after you joined and right before I left. And so we had this like insane crucible of a CES and then parted ways for a long time. And now we get to work together again. We spent a lot of time in that CS trailer where I learned that David is really good at writing headlines. And CS from a Verge perspective is exhausting, but fun. Some things don't change, it turns out. All right. So before we get into some of the questions we got from folks, let's just set up kind of who you are and what we're doing here.

6:11So you're the Verge's publisher. What does that mean? That means first and foremost for this show, I am Eli's boss. That's very important. But what that really means is I am the layer of the company Vox Media, our parent company, in between editorial, the newsroom, and the business side. So my job is to oversee the newsroom and kind of buffer it from the business things when we talk about the firewall between editorial and business. Hi, I'm Helen. I'm the firewall. You're the firewall. I'm the firewall. That's really good. And so I spend a lot of time making sure that The Verge is making enough money to support our journalism.

6:49I spend a lot of time working on management problems, strategy problems. I spend a lot of time on the phone with Nilay. But yes, I think for, you know, all intents and purposes, my most important job is the firewall between the business and The Verge, such that we keep it running and keep everyone employed while also doing great work. Yeah, I feel like I always think of you as the person whose job is to be simultaneously the most high level and the most in the weeds of anyone at The Verge. Yes. One way I sometimes explain my job to people is I spend 30 % of my time just on straight up management headaches.

7:26I spend 30 % of my time on what are our biggest businesses that we need to take care of. That has historically been advertising. So I spent a bunch of time going to client meetings, events, all of those fun things. And I spend 30 % of my time working on new businesses. Where do I think The Verge needs to be in the future? And the biggest one of those this year has been subscriptions, which I know we're going to talk about later. Yeah. So to that point, actually, one of the questions we've gotten a bit of is both why this? Like, why do a subscription to the website? But I would say more significantly, the question seems to be why now?

8:02As opposed to, you know, people have been doing this for forever. There are lots of folks who haven't. Why was this the time? Well, I'll take those questions maybe separately, the why subscriptions and why now. Why subscriptions? I think anyone who listens to The Vergecast has heard Nilay and you, David, talk about Google Zero and some of the forces that are shaping the internet in the future. There have been a lot of pressures on media businesses over the years. The Verge is a big advertising business. But when you look at how does a big digital advertising business work today, things that are pressure on that business model, a lot of ad technology is made and sold by companies like Facebook and Google.

8:45They own an outsized portion of the total digital media advertising pie. Vox Media has insulated ourselves from that a bit by also having our own ad tech stack called Concert, which I don't think we talk enough about. But that's definitely one pressure. Another is the pressure of distribution on our scale. So advertising, you make a lot of money in advertising if you can charge high rates for it because the product you make is really good. Or maybe you're not sharing a cut of that with someone else. You make money because you're reaching a lot of people. And that's where distribution has really changed since, you know, 2016, Facebook was sending a firehose of traffic to everyone.

9:25Google has been sending firehoses of traffic to every publisher in the world. And with the rise of generative search, that's changing. Search is changing a lot. And so, you know, Neelai and I have been talking for a long time about how do we prepare the verge for a point where we're not getting a ton of traffic from other people's platforms. And so we need our own audience. That was the whole premise of our redesigned website in 2022. And so the kind of next extension of that, how do you insulate the business model from some of these big forces? what's subscription, what drives a really good subscriptions business.

10:02It's really good content that reaches a lot of loyal people. And so it was kind of the obvious next place to go. That being said, we've been really cautious, I would say, in how we've approached it to try and keep a big free product of The Verge going at the same time. A lot of people use The Verge as a daily news utility. If we don't want to be so dependent on other people's distribution, I think we need to tend to that daily habit. Make sure we do a good job there. But, you know, I think the challenges of running an internet content business are huge. They're only getting harder and worse. I think the place we need to be to insulate ourselves from all that change is to have a healthy subscriptions business.

10:46And then why now? You know, the best time to launch, what is the cliche saying? The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The next best time is tomorrow. Same with subscriptions. The best time to launch a subscription business is 10 years ago. The next time is tomorrow. Fair enough. Do you think the ultimate goal here is to kind of be all of those things at the same time? Like we talk about, you know, there's an advertising business and there's a subscriptions business and there's having a huge audience and there's having a dedicated audience. And I feel like a lot of what we've seen in media over the last few years is people betting on one or the other and very rarely all of the above.

11:24Do you think it's possible to bet on all of the above? When you say all of the above, the thing I would maybe clarify is I think where people got into trouble as media businesses was betting on total traffic and total page use. and what has become really clear as x has stopped sending meaningful traffic as zuckerberg has gotten less interested in news um is that true audience is different from a bunch of page views yes and so when we're thinking about what do we need to invest in it's true audience who comes to us directly things we know about those people right like you could look at the total verge page views, but the people who are true Verge audience, those people on average do a lot of page views for us.

12:15That's where a lot of our meaningful audience comes from. And so if I were to say what we need is a large, loyal audience of real people who truly care about and form habit around the Verge, and that is the single biggest asset. And on that asset, you can support several kinds of businesses. You could support an advertising business. You can support a subscriptions business. You could support a commerce business. But the true currency that I think any media brand needs in order to survive the next 13 years is a direct, loyal audience who actually has affinity and builds habit around your brand.

12:54Yeah. Yeah. I remember my old boss at Wired, Nick Thompson, always used to say when they were doing the paywall over there that the beauty of this system is it just aligns us better with the people who read our stuff. It's like, that's just, we're going to do lots of other things, but this idea that we are now pulling in the same direction as the people who come to our website every day feels pretty good. Yeah. You know, I think there's the part of a subscription business that's just business, right? This is another revenue line for us. But one thing I'm really excited about is, okay, if we're going to build loyalty and habit, what we really need people to do is come directly to The Verge, log into The Verge, spend a bunch of time on The Verge, maybe become a commenter, interact with our people, and getting people to subscribe and pay for something actually ends up deepening their relationship.

13:44And it makes us, I think, more directly accountable to our audience. I think we have always felt directly accountable to our audience, but in a way like you all listeners of VergeCast who might now be Verge subscribers, you are our clients. We have a job we have to do for you. We have standards we have to meet. And I think it aligns editorial and business incentives in a really great way. I wouldn't say that advertising is opposite. I think advertising rewards good journalism if you're trying to do, you know, like a good direct advertising business. But I am excited for the way this will change our relationship to our audience.

14:23Totally. Well, with that in mind, let me give you three questions that our audience has been asking us that I think you're the best person to answer. The first one is, I would say by several orders of magnitude, the most asked question over the last two weeks, both before and after we announced the subscription, which I got a kick out of. And it is ad-free podcasts in general and ad-free Vergecast in particular. That is not part of the subscription. Where is your mind and The Verge's mind on ad-free podcasts? I love Vergecast listeners. I know you all want ad-free podcasting. I think, look, first, David, I want to set some context about media.

15:07It is a bloodbath out there right now. Like, our competitors are cutting jobs. Newsrooms are moving away from reporting on news. Journalism jobs keep going away. And so success for The Verge and our subscription product is not that we are, like, making a bunch of media executives super rich and buying super cars. Success is, like, we get to continue to exist. And if we're super successful, maybe we get to give a few more journalists jobs next year and have their work here on The Verge cast. So this is not like a big, remarkable profit engine, the media business, famously wildly profitable. You're not buying several fancy new cars as a result of this.

15:50No, I'm so sorry, Neelai. I won't be buying you a new truck. So if The Verge shows really well next year, what that looks like is we get to give a few more journalist jobs and we get to continue to exist. So I want to set that context of like, what we're trying to do here is continue to exist, make more things, make better things. But, you know, there's a reason PR people outnumber journalists six to one in this country right now. It's because virtually every journalist could leave the industry and make more money elsewhere. A big place The Verge has lost reporters to is actually Google. We love you, Dieter.

16:24But we don't leave. Like, we all care about the work. We really like working with our colleagues. It's kind of earnest and corny. Sorry, David. But that's why we keep doing this. I know. We try to avoid saying that out loud, but it is true. Without it that way, I've talked a little bit about why subscriptions and why now. In the subscription product on the website, we did a premium ad experience and we did it instead of an ad-free experience. And I'll kind of explain why. The Verge makes most of our money in advertising today. We are not in a situation where The Verge is in such trouble. We need to make a hard pivot because there's no advertising left.

16:56And the only thing that will save us is subscription revenue. we still have a pretty good ad business and we need to take care of that thing because it's going to be paying our bills for the next several years. Subscriptions are a really long game. And so as we build this thing, we cannot afford to mess up our advertising business or The Verge will be in bad trouble. So as we were looking, though, at what do people want from The Verge website? Well, they wanted fewer ads. They wanted better ads. They definitely didn't want the chum boxes. And so we said, OK, if we can't do ad free because we need to take care of our ad business And what people are really talking about is they don't want it to interrupt their reading experience so much.

17:30They don't want some of the like video ads. They don't want the outbrained chum boxes. We can make that happen. Right. So we did a premium ad experience. And then benefits of that to the ad side are, you know, those chum boxes and some of those other ad units, those are served by third parties. And so any ads sold there aren't sold directly by Vox Media. And so someone else is taking a cut. So when I got rid of those in our subscription, what I can also do is say to our advertisers, if you want to reach the premium verge audience who subscribes and pays for us, the only way to do that is to buy your ads directly from Vox Media.

18:04And I love that because then I don't have to give a cut of any revenue to anyone else. And that helps me insulate my business. I mentioned earlier, Vox Media makes their own ad tech. It's like a weird part of the business, but it's an important thing of like, now I can serve my own ads. I don't give anyone else a cut. And so the end result of the premium ad experience on the website is we tend to the ad business. We maybe actually give us a really powerful, good tool to do better in the ads business. And we do service for our audience to streamline the page, maybe make more people read, maybe make people have a better experience so they read more pages and that it all kind of works.

18:41So that's the website. We did not include podcasts at launch in part because we're just trying to launch. The best time to launch a subscription is 10 years ago. So we're just trying to get out the door. But there's two barriers that make podcast advertising a little bit harder for us to figure out. One is technical and one is business. So I'll talk about those separately. On the technical front, we don't control any of the platforms where people are listening to podcasts. I doubt many of you Vergecasters are like clicking a megaphone embed on our website. If you are, we love to. I bet you are listening to the show on YouTube, in Apple Podcasts and Spotify, in wherever you get your podcasts, right?

19:20So we don't control that, which means it's a little hard to have an ad-free podcast feed because we're not in control of the platform. So the way most people do it today is they have their main feed, which contains ads, and then they create a separate feed that is the ad-free feed that they give to subscribers. That does take people off the main feed, which reduces their total numbers there. And then if the distribution platform does anything algorithmically in terms of recommendations, you've taken a bunch of audience out of your main feed, but you've also taken, like, the most engaged audience out of that feed.

19:55So that can be a little bit risky, right? You know, Apple is now offering Apple podcast subscriptions, but that is in their platform. They own the customer relationships. They own the credit cards. That's not good for our business. And so there's a technical barrier. It can be overcome, but that's just one thing that we're thinking about. That is both like the beautiful and complicated thing about podcasts is that there just is no one who can wrap their arms around the whole thing. Yeah, so it's kind of a hacky solution. Yeah, you make a separate feed and you give it to a bunch of people. And if they unsubscribe, I think it's not really easy to cut them off from that feed.

20:33But like all of this is like solvable, right? It's not ideal, but it's solvable. You can come up with solutions. Plenty of people have come up with solutions to do this. I would say the bigger issue for us is the business issue. So when we were launching and we were figuring out what to charge for a Verge subscription, we wanted to keep the price point pretty low so that it was accessible to as many people as possible for the people who make the Verge part of their daily utility. And we did not want to come in super high on pricing and both alienate our core Verge people, but also like limit the number of people we could, you know, entice into a subscription.

21:07The thing is, podcast ads are currently worth more than website ads. I think for those of you who are listening to this podcast, you have David and Neelai in your ears. It is a more engaging ad format than a banner ad. Even the most engaging banner ad, I would say, my guess is podcast advertising is by and large outperforming some other forms of advertising, which means it's very expensive and advertisers happen to love the Vergecast. As you have seen, advertisers are even buying the lightning round on the Vergecast. We will never understand why, but we are grateful that they do it. So for us to take ads out of the Vergecast for, again, the most engaged people, that would cost us a lot of money and it would cost us more money than we are charging for a subscription.

21:53So then we have kind of two possibilities. One is to say, OK, is there some kind of ad light experience similar to what we're doing on the website? Like what is fewer ads that's few enough that you Vergecast people would not be still furiously angry that there are ads? is it one pre-roll? Like, what does that look like? I think that's one avenue to explore. The other is to say, okay, maybe there's a price or a separate tier of Verge subscription such that we could take all ads out of the Verge cast without killing our business. And I think both of those are things we will be exploring. I know people want it.

22:31I would like to be able to give it to people and I think we'll be able to figure it out. But those are just the business realities of podcasting ads and why it's a little harder for us to lose those. Because again, while I would like everyone here to maybe dream that a ton of people are getting wildly rich off digital media, it is just not the case. And so what we are trying to do here is continue to exist, hire a few more journalists. Yeah, yeah, the goal is to be able to keep making the Vergecast. Like that's fundamentally what we're here to do. That's a good answer. And I will say just to everyone who has written in, It's this and it's chapters on the podcast.

23:10And I promise you, we hear you. And we are thinking about both all the time. And again, thank you to everybody who writes in and tells us their feelings because you all have a lot of them and I very much enjoy it. All right. Two more simpler questions and then I'm going to let you get out of here. Question number one is we got a bunch of questions about Apple News, both in terms of like, should I read the website if I want to support The Verge? is should I read and subscribe there or should I read it in Apple News Plus now that it's in Apple News Plus? And just a bunch of people trying to figure out the sort of content mix.

23:44We used to have a lot of stuff in Apple News. Now we're in Apple News Plus. How does that factor into kind of the broader subscription thinking here? I'll say the broader subscription thinking is that now we charge for the Verge. There is a Verge subscription, which means we are giving less of the Verge away for free. And in particular, we are giving less of the Verge away for free on other people's platforms. And so a great way to support The Verge is to subscribe to The Verge and use our website. Put a bookmark on your homepage. Read us there. That's terrific. We are also participating in Apple News+.

24:19So going forward in Apple News, you will need to be an Apple News Plus subscriber in order to read The Verge there. And I know there were some people, it sounds like actually more people than I thought who were loyal Verge readers who were reading us for free in Apple News were really sad now. I was very surprised by how many people noticed us being gone from Apple News. Yeah, I was actually surprised, not because there's not a ton of Apple News users who consume their news that way. That's totally a way people consume their news. But more of that within Apple News, people were like loyally following The Verge specifically because it is more of an algorithmic news platform.

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24:58Or I guess in their case, it's more of an editor curated news experience where it's a bunch of different publications. So I think the surprising thing to me there is not, was more like they're curating so many publications that there's people who specifically care about The Verge for reading us in Apple News. But the reality is we're now charging on our website. I would hate to be charging people for something on our website and then giving it away for free somewhere else. That would not feel also fair to the people who are paying us on the website. And so for that reason, I would say two important ways you could support The Verge would be subscribing to The Verge.

25:32Or if you are an Apple News Plus subscriber or would like to consume your news that way, subscribe to Apple News Plus and then read a bunch of Verge content in Apple. And that also supports us. And that's fine by me. Yeah, that's a that's a that win win, I think, is actually a useful thing, because a thing we hear surprisingly frequently is people being like, I want to support The Verge. What is the best way to do that? And the thing I always have told people is coming out on the website. And now I feel like it's coming out on the website and pay for the website. But also, like, if you are an Apple News Plus person and want to stay that way, that's fine.

26:04That that works for us, too. Yeah, that supports us too. All right, that's good. All right, one more. This is a question from Tim that I'm just going to read verbatim because I thought it was really interesting and I want to know what you think. Tim says, so you've often spoken about how adding a subscription model to something that is otherwise ad-supported can change how ads are sold or what the value of them is. It changes the demographics of the free users in a way that reduces the value of the ads. And then basically, like, what do we do with that now that The Verge has made this shift? Was that part of the thinking of making the shift?

26:34Well, definitely. I mean, I think you just heard me explain why we did a premium ad experience instead of ad-free. And it was for exactly this reason. If we were to take all of our content and make it totally ad-free for Verge subscribers, that weakens your advertising business both in terms of scale, like how much audience is there, how engaged that scale is. And then also, I think advertisers perceive that someone who is paying for The Verge is someone who truly loves The Verge, truly cares about The Verge. And if an advertiser wants to work with The Verge, that's exactly the person they want to most reach, our, like, super fans.

27:17And so Tim is dead on that the reason we did not do ad-free is because we thought it would be too damaging to our advertising business, which, again, will pay our bills for the next several years at least and which I think can happily coexist. And so this is in the world of digital media where, again, success is like journalism continues to happen. But you're seeing the same pressure play out on platforms like Netflix, right? Netflix was ad-free for a long time and has finally had to reckon with the fact that even as a subscription business, there are cheaper subscription tiers. They're not charging enough money to make up for the money they would make just doing ads.

27:56And so there is definitely a fine balance. If you put too many ads and you alienate people and they don't want to consume your content, that's a bad experience. And it's bad for the advertiser, too. So I guess all of which is to say that's exactly why we're doing premium ad experience and not ad free. Okay, fair enough. And then how did we land on the price? $7 a month,$50 a year. Where is that? Is that number art? Is it science? Where did that come from? Oh, that's good. How do we land on price? So we want it to be affordable enough that we thought a lot of people who subscribe to The Verge could pay for us.

28:29we did a survey last year to ask people, like, would we be part of your kind of personal expenses or business expenses? And by and large, what we heard is we would be part of people's personal expenses. We didn't therefore want to charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year that we assumed people would be billing back to our workplace. Right. Which is like the Wall Street Journal money. Like that's a different kind of expense. Yeah. Or the information or some of those competitors, right? I think I would assume a lot of those subscriptions are being billed back to the workplace. What we heard is people want to subscribe to The Verge because they personally love The Verge, and it's part of not just their work utility, but it's also something that brings them entertainment and joy.

29:12And so those are the people we want to reach with our subscription, people who have a true relationship with The Verge, people who make it part of their daily habit. And so we didn't want a price too high that we would not be able to reach those people. And so we did a bunch of competitive research. We did a bunch of research on what it will cost us to run this thing. We did a bunch of research on what is turning off all the ads that we turned off cost and what do we need to cover there. And so we kind of put all of that together to arrive at the price. We did decide to charge significantly less if people subscribe annually than monthly.

29:49um that's because i want a long-term relationship with people our annual subscription also right now comes with this incredibly cool magazine content goblins that is deranged and perfect and wonderful yeah as a former engagement editor who did marketing and seo before you were a content goblin yes we've all done it at one point it's okay well no we're all still content david um but yeah so we we had to be expensive enough to cover our costs and make this a good business, but I wanted to be cheap enough and Neelai and I think everyone wanted to be cheap enough that we thought people could afford this as part of their daily entertainment, maybe more so than an expensive subscription they bought through work.

30:29Fair enough. I like it. I don't know. There's actually like that many great places to hang out online anymore. I don't know if like this is part of the canon of AI content that hits the web or how the social platforms are working. Like there just aren't that many fun places on the web anymore. I think The Verge fills that for a lot of people. I want it to fill that for a lot of people. And so we want it to price where it could be part of people's regular budget. And it is very fun to just be increasingly focused on making TheVerge.com a fun place to hang out. Like that, in addition to all of the high-minded journalistic ideals, that's a really fun problem to try and solve, is just make it a fun place to be.

31:08And that is a real goal we have. Yeah. Yeah, that was quick posts, right? That's what we wanted to do with the new website was create a homepage that's so fun. You sit there and you refresh it all day. I mean, David, I think you know this, but I joined The Verge because I was a super Verge fan in my past life when I worked in marketing for Samsung. And I would refresh The Verge all day at my work computer. I just loved seeing what was happening. I loved 90 seconds on The Verge. Real throwback. And we're going to get emails about that now. Yeah. And I think having that kind of energy of like a cool place to be someplace you want to refresh and see what's happening.

31:45And like, I don't know what Liz Lopato has decided to quick post in a given day. Like it should be a fun place to be. Totally. Totally. All right. Well, we got to take a break. But Helen, you have to come back soon and talk about something other than the grand business of The Verge. We have lots of stuff. It's gonna be fun. As you know, David, I'm going to come back and I'm going to tell you how I use Figma for garden design. Oh, wait. Yes. Sold. That was an even better pitch than I expected. We're going to do that. All right. Helen, thank you as always. Bye, David. Thanks for having me. All right.

32:18We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk to Neelai. We'll be right back.

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35:02All right, we're back. So there's more business stuff to talk about, and I suspect we will talk about some of it. But let's switch gears a bit and talk about how we make the things that we make and how we think about the world that we live in. And who better to do that with than your friend, my co-host, my boss, Verge's editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel. That sounded like a wrestling intro. That was pretty fun. We have a lot of questions for Nilay. We're going to spend a bunch of time talking about all of this stuff. So let's just dive into it. Nilay, hello. Hello. I just want you to know that Helen was here before you and she called herself the firewall.

35:38She was like, hi, I'm Helen. I'm the firewall. And that's awesome. And that is what you have to live up to on this episode. you need a nickname that you give yourself that is so good that I agree to it. The fire. The fire. There we go. All right, that's pretty good. Okay, so we got a lot of questions around a couple of different themes. So I have tried to sort of break this up thematically, but you're going to notice it just gets more random as it goes because we've just got a lot of questions. We're going to answer as many of them as we can. But can I just agree with you that Helen is an incredibly hard act to follow?

36:09Oh, God, yeah. There's a reason we made her our boss. We were like, you should be in charge. Yeah. It's very real. Okay. We have what I would call like a gentle controversy to start with, which I'm very excited about. So let me, I'm going to play you a question and then I'm going to read you an email. And I think they're together. So we're going to talk about them together. If this isn't about whether or not theater at large of The Verge should have a shitty TV in good taste, I'm going to be very disappointed. No, I think everyone's actually pretty aligned on that one. I'm the outlier on that one.

36:41But that's okay. I'm good with it. All right. Let me just play this question for you. Hi, this is Jessica from Massachusetts. One of the things that I've always appreciated about The Verge was the wall that you put between the sales department and the newsroom. Now that you have lightning round sponsorships, and now that the team is aware of who the sponsors are, how are you going to maintain that journalistic integrity? Thanks so much. Love you guys. Good listening for you. Okay, so we have that. And I'd also like to read you an email we got from Max. My daughter? Not your daughter. Okay. But you never know.

37:18Max does have thoughts. The email is, why do I have to be quiet? Max writes, Neelai has said multiple times that he keeps a firewall between the newsroom and the ad scene, and it's been said that they would make money if the news people read the ads versus ad people. Neelai goes as far as to not directly say the companies that are sponsoring the lightning round. But David does ad reads for the Verge cast. Liam, I know he's the producer, but he does appear as a voice from time to time, also does them. What makes those reads different or acceptable? Why can David do ad reads but Neelai can't? Different questions, same thing.

37:48Wait, no, I think they're different things. Are they? Yeah. Why do you think they're? Okay, well then let's pull them apart. Why do you think they're different things? So we can look at our own website and see who our advertisers are all the time. That's a very normal thing. So knowing who the Lightning Round sponsors are, to me, is not any different than knowing whatever that you know whatever wireless carrier is buying ads on our site around iphone time it's been 13 years i know the wireless carriers buy ads on our site around iphone time i think you can see that that doesn't really affect how we cover the wireless carriers right um so knowing who the lightning round sponsor is to me is it that's just all of a piece right it's we can we can see the product that we deliver to the audience um and we just don't let that affect us like where they come they go the rule is the advertising team doesn't get to tell us what to do and we don't get to tell them what to do right and that is very difficult like i there are there are ads on this show that i know people would prefer we didn't have but because the advertising team doesn't get to tell us what to do our ability to to open the door and start telling them what to do is challenging because then the door's open right now we're negotiating and i don't want to have that negotiation.

39:05So that's just different to me, right? It's we're aware of what they're doing because we, at the end that we, we assemble the whole product and we put it out in the world and the lightning round is new and it's funny. And it's funny that the first sponsor was a big company, but we have ideas for that too. So I, we're just going to work that out. It's, it's new, but I think that is a familiar expression of the firewall. And the reason I was joking that I'm the fire is because the people that yell the most of the yelling usually goes in one direction. It's me that way. I was going to say, I think you spend a lot of time telling sales what to do.

39:37They're just not obligated to listen to you, I think is a key difference. Right. My job is to protect the user experience of the website. Right. And so like you can just look around at advertising supported websites and you can see the things that we have not done. And that is a lot of me and Helen agreeing that we're not going to do those things. And then I'm just the heavy. Like I get to yell where she has to go run our business. So that's that. So does that have I adequately separated these two things? Yeah, no, I think that's fair. And I think the point that I was going to make about the firewall is what you said, that it actually exists in both directions, which is that, like, they see the stuff that we make and we see the stuff that they sell.

40:14But neither side has any idea of what's going on. And, like, we didn't know. I didn't know when I made the rundown for the show who was advertising in that show. So, right, it's like knowing who they are is, I think, less compromising than if we understood more of the process and how much money was involved and what was sold for when and to whom. Like that we stay away from very much on purpose. But like, you're right, I can I can look at our Web page and tell you who's advertising on it. And I think by and large, that's mostly fine. Yeah. And I can pull that even farther back. We trade on a lot of old school journalism.

40:45We're built on a foundation that has been around for a long time. So when you were printing magazines, the advertising was printed in the magazine, right? And you had to physically assemble that product and decide where the ads would go. If I was a car and driver reader in the nineties in Wisconsin, when I was a kid and half of the letters, the editor were like, why are there BMW ads around the BMW review? You're biased. And like they would print the letters just so they could say, look, no, we're not. Whether or not you believe them in the nineties and car and driver, they did give a lot of good reviews to BMWs back then.

41:17But this is just like an old muscle, right? You have an editor-in-chief and you have a publisher. And Helen and I have a great relationship, but she's the business and I'm the newsroom. And we're supposed to have a little bit of tension. And that's good. Like, that's what we mean by the firewall. She has to go make us money and I have to spend the money. Great. I didn't know you were reading the ads. And I'm just going to tell you that you have to stop. I think I've read one ad this year. Okay. For whatever it's worth. Um, yeah. Okay. So we should talk about this in two ways. Uh, one is just realistically, you are my boss and you get to tell me what to do.

41:55So like you, you win this fight. But, uh, I think as, as a, as a co-host of the Verge cast, I do want to press on this because I think this is something I just have less religion about than you do on podcast ads in particular. Uh, and I just want to poke at it, right? Like the, the line for me of like, we don't make branded content, right, is like so, so, so clear and so clean and so important to everything that we do. Right. So like when when years ago, like branded blog posts were like a huge business for BuzzFeed and it was a thing everybody was talking about, like the divide between those two things was always very clear to me.

42:32It's that's less problematic for me in podcasts than like it's not quite as stark for me there. Like you see a lot of podcast ads where one thing they really want is like personal experience, right? So you hear your podcast host talk about the product they got and why they like it. That's part of the ad. The advertiser pays more money for that. And we just resolutely won't do that. We just don't do it. And the middle ground there where it's like the host who is obviously reading an ad, reads an ad, is just like a common part of the form of podcasts and frankly just makes me feel less gross than it would in some other forms and i can't totally describe why but that's where i'm at like i think that the advertiser i read an ad for is like not somebody we would ever cover uh i would never do it for somebody we would ever cover and yeah i don't know it felt okay and it always comes to me it's like here's a thing to do i'm like sure and i just read it and it's over i would say one of the major challenges of uh having David work at your organization is David's like, yeah, I will do everything.

43:40And then you're like, wait, that rocket ship is gone. And that's very much the David Pierce experience. And I love it. I have no complaints about that. But the, I think that, I think I've just been radicalized over the past five to 10 to 13 years of writing this place. I think that nuance is gone. I think it is dead. And I particularly think that the new audience, the younger audience that came up in influencer world, does not even know that there should be a firewall, does not even know that we're trading on hundreds of years of traditional journalism, editor, publisher dynamics. We're going to print a magazine and the ads are going to sit next to the reviews and there's a whole ecosystem and there's lots of crotchety old journalists who talk about the fights.

44:27Like they don't even know that existed because it's gone. Right. We're just rebuilding the ecosystem from scratch for better or worse. And most of the creators we compete with have decided that there's not a wall. The wall exists within themselves, right? And they have to, and I think a lot of them do a good job of explaining where their lines are going to be. Fine. Our line is just very different. And I think the second we make it more complicated, we lose. Right. And so like us saying, well, you know, we have a list of approved advertisers that we'll do host reads for, but we want to personal, like in the broad ecosystem of stuff, like I think that message just gets lost.

45:09Right. And the idea that you can pay us to say stuff is the only message that comes through. So that's why I've been like very over the years, like I used to read some of the ads and I thought it was funny when we restarted the Engadget podcast, we had no ads because who is going to with me and Josh and Paul, just like start like restarting this whole podcast. I was sitting around. And when we got our first test, we were like thrilled, right? Because it was like validating. And I can see a bunch of creators feel the validation of, oh, an advertiser. The first brand deal is a moment as a creator.

45:41And I'm totally sympathetic to that. So like I've had all the experiences. I just think now at this point when we are rebuilding this ecosystem from scratch for an audience that has no familiarity with it, where the instinct and the expectation is you can pay people to say things on social platforms. I think we just have to be harsher about it. And fundamentally, what we're selling with our subscription is like, this is the thing that keeps us from having to do that to keep the lights on. And maybe that's too harsh. I think at the end of the day, like the internet destroys nuance. and I'm just, I'm willing to be a little harsher to preserve the clarity of our message around how the journalism is made than maybe I was a few years ago, right?

46:27Like, that's fine. Like, Josh once gave away a car on the verge, and he was, like, in the back of a Ford, like, giving away a car. Like, we've done all the things, and we've had all the experiences, and I think what the thing that I'm just really settled on is it's too hard to convey the nuance. we just end up over communicating about the advertising why the advertising didn't affect us than about the journalism and i would rather just spend our time focused on the journalism that's fair i mean i feel like that argument is the same one for why you won't shut up about this on our site and on the podcast and wherever and why we're doing this episode right like i think a thing i have realized over time is that like you're you we're doing this as a publication sort of performatively and it's on purpose, right?

47:15Like it is, we are making more out of this than we need to because that is, the tide is pulling the other way. Yeah, and look, these are very traditional standards we were talking about. Right. We have peers and friends at traditional newsrooms who are like, why do you guys talk about this so much? This is just how it works. This is what I mean. Like we came up with an ethics policy and you were like, I have done ethics. And it's like, no, other people have had ethics policies. Yeah, and our ethics policy, to be 100 % honest, was totally stolen from Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal. We just boosted theirs and that we've slowly iterated on it over the years.

47:48This is old stuff. But I think the failure of the journalism industry, not the media industry, the journalism industry is not communicating how the information is made. Every other industry is like, look at how cool it is that we made this thing. You want to watch a Dorito get made? There's infinity content that's like, watch this corn turn into a Dorito. and you're like, wow, that's really cool. You want to watch how journalism gets made. No one ever talks about it. They're just like, here's the story where the New York Times don't question us. And I think in this ecosystem, when so many creators on social platforms are so powerful and so influential and they talk about how they make this stuff all the time, we can play a little bit of that game.

48:30And all we're really saying is we're doing this the old fashioned way, right? Like we are just going to remain independent. We have new competitors who have substantially the same policy as us. four or four media, substantially the same policies as us, right? I'm not saying this is totally unexpected. I think the piece of it that's new is we have to communicate it about very loudly. And I think this is the part we can argue about. We have to draw much harsher lines to make the message simple enough for the modern internet. Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, and I think we ultimately land in not that different places, right?

49:02Which is that like in a vacuum, this is a sliding scale, but we're just, we and you in particular are just choosing not to treat this as a sliding scale because like i'm just going to live all the way at the top because it is a slippery and hard to explain slope as soon as you start going down it uh and that's fine i buy that logic it is uh i would say there are probably people who work at vox media who wish you would be a little less militant on that particular i just want to be there it is like i don't want to i don't want to i'm not going to shade this we would make a ton of money if we were that and actually another weird piece of our structure and being a media company and making traditional journalism is that if David and I were just creators, literally we would make the money if we read the ads.

49:45Like individually, we would just cash the checks and then, you know, buy cars. Like that's what I would do. I don't know David would do. I'd make David buy an OLED TV. We don't do that. The company cashes the checks and then we use it to pay for our newsroom. Right. And we've got this huge newsroom behind us that does most of the work that we just talked about on the show. And I like that. I want to keep making journalism jobs. I want to keep hiring 22-year-olds who have no idea what they're doing and watch them graduate and go to senior positions and start their own things in the future. We've done a lot of that over 13 years, and that's just because of the revenue.

50:21So yeah, we could make a lot more money. We wouldn't make it as individuals. Maybe we could fund our newsroom, but I think we would end up destroying the core value of the newsroom. And you can see many of our competitors that have made those kinds of deals or made those kinds of trade-offs do not exist anymore. Because ultimately, the only thing you're really selling is your credibility. And once you let that go, it's gone. Right. And there's, I mean, like, you can draw a straight line from the end of that sentence to, and this is why we did this subscription, right? It aligns all of that stuff much more cleanly when the people who consume our stuff are the ones who pay for that stuff.

50:59There's just no weirdness in that circle in a way that is really, really clarifying and helpful. Yeah, I think it's challenging. And like I said, we would make a lot more money if I read the answer. It's not lost on me. And it is, Helen is one side of the firewall and I'm the other. And I'm the one who says we're not going to make that money. That money is too expensive. right is like a way that i think about it it's it costs too much to make this money we will not make more money in the future we'll just make it in the beginning and then we'll be now we'll be competing against people who will do even worse things that we will not do and i don't want to compete with them and the good news weirdly is that the more we stay harsh the more we are differentiated the more stable the demand remains right people want to buy advertising on our site because big brands want to buy advertising on our site because they know they can't buy us which is weird that's just a weird outcome in the right in the media ecosystem lots of co's want to come on decoder all the time because they they know they can't tell me to do and like i think a lot of them want to prove to their teams that they can take the heat weird that's just a weird it's a counterintuitive notion in a world where a bunch of you know like casey newton is always joking with me that the podcast ecosystem is like you can pick two names out of a hat and they've interviewed each other on a podcast and there's like rules and like a lot of them are programmed and like whatever right a lot of it is branded content is bought and paid for and we're not and because we're so loud about it we have a long list of incoming we're not lacking for people who want to show up and and talk on our show so there's greater value there over the long term and being focused on that long term is really hard and i mean there's an ecosystem that quite frankly is like dying by the day so that's where part of subscriptions come in is like how do we make something healthy and resilient, how do we diversify our revenue?

52:51And then how do we make sure that we're still selling the thing that we're selling, which is independence? All right. That's good. All right. Wait, can I, we have to address why Liam gets to read the ads. Oh yeah, sure. Okay. Well, here, let me, let me play the next question, which I think is a good way to get into this. Hi, Julian Joseph here calling from my closet. Sorry, I just want to do a David intro there. Yeah. I'm just curious actually about how you decide to do ads on the show. In particular, Y 'all talked about this a little bit, but I'm really curious on how you make the decision on who reads those ads.

53:25I remember at some point, Neelai was reading some HubSpot ads. This was at least I want to say a few years ago. I don't forget because I used to work at Salesforce. But yeah, I'm just curious how you make that decision on who is going to read the ads, whether or not somebody who is actually a host of the show versus producer versus somebody else. It seems like there was a change at some point made, perhaps to give a little bit more distance. I noticed other shows do this differently. I've been thinking about it a bit as I start to do some consulting myself and thinking about paid partnerships and what that actually looks like.

54:02And I just love to get a little bit more insight on how you make those decisions. So there you go. You knew the frame of the question. And I just want to get more people's voices onto the show. I do like the fake David intro. You'd be alarmed at how often I'm in my closet recording. Yeah, you'd be alarmed at how often David is faking the intro. He's like, I'm riding a horse. He's like doing the coconuts in the closet. How dare you? How dare you? Look, this is the inside baseball, man. That's what people want. David has so many coconuts in his closet. So, yeah, why Liam? So the reality of we would make a lot more money if we read the ads is real, right?

54:39And that is just demand in the market. What they want is host reads. What they want is what David is talking about, personal experience. They are trying to trade on the trust you have with the voices you're hearing. That's advertising. That is just fundamentally how advertising works. They're like, you trust this person. Now they will sell you a cell phone. And that, if you watch television advertising, you're like, random SNL celebrity selling you Verizon. That's just a thing that is happening left and right. So that's like the foundation of advertising. And I honestly, I have no like moral complaint about that.

55:12That's how that industry works. And it's worked for a long time. And I think people understand it. Where I think it's dicey is we as journalists should not be endorsing things, especially as product reviewers. And there's other categories where maybe it makes sense, but we do so much product reviewing that we should not be anywhere near products. At the same time, we know the demand in the market is there. So our solution here is that Liam is a character on our show. He is a familiar voice, but he is just the producer of the show. He's not writing product reviews for the site. He doesn't have editorial control over the show, which I have a lot of sympathy for Liam.

55:43Being the producer of the show that the editor-in-chief hosts, it's a real pain in the ass. Yeah. Huge, huge pain in the ass. So it's just insulated enough. And then the rule is Liam doesn't get to do anything except read the copy that is delivered to him. So there's not even that back-and-forth weirdness. we think that's a good solution, right? We think it matches with the experience everybody else has on other podcasts, which is like, here's a familiar voice reading this thing. It's not our voices, right? So we solved that problem and maybe we've gotten it wrong. You should tell us. But it creates enough of the same product where our sales team can go into the market and compete without causing all the downstream problems because it's not us.

56:30And like in a very real way, it's not us. I'm open to the feedback, but I think there's enough division there where I'm not, the nuance isn't being crushed or I'm not relying on the nuance. Like it's a different person. I will say my dream for the longest time has been to bring back the hype desk and have an on-staff influencer who just lives on the hype desk. Yep. This is the loneliest job in America. You get to be part of The Verge, but not in the newsroom. And your job is to just do branded content and never talk to anyone in the newsroom because we have to maintain the wall. You can see why no one has signed up for this job.

57:05Like, be alone. Be the thing you can buy on The Verge that's totally isolated from everyone else. Does not seem like a great job. But it's one of the other ways we've thought about the solution here. I don't know if that's ever going to happen. But we're trying to find ways to be competitive in the market and still preserve the credibility that is fundamentally the thing we're selling. But Liam's here. Liam, do you have anything to add to this? Yeah, I would just say I get ad requests on a regular basis. It's not something I communicate to Nilay or David at all. They have no idea what ads I've read that week and what get included in the show.

57:39So that's one of the ways we create that boundary. I do enjoy the emails I get every week from people complaining about one ad or another. That's how I find out who advertises on our show most of the time is from people who are mad about it. So those emails are really interesting. I think they're proof that people can't tell the difference. Right? that it's all one experience and mostly our competitors take responsibility for the whole experience yeah that's and we we just don't and like that's i think that's weird i think it's dissonant for a lot of people but i fundamentally i i don't know if you can keep them separate while you're taking the junkets and while you're accepting the brand deals and negotiating the rates i maybe some creators can again there's lots of them who have really laid out exactly what they will and want to.

58:27Michael Fisher, Mr. Mobile, has been very complimentary of our ethics policy over the years. He has done an excellent job of laying out what he will and won't do and how it will work for him. But he still takes the money, right? And like, you've got to trust him. I think a lot of people do. I think that's a reasonable position to take. Like, he's laid it out. He's been explicit. He's very clear. That's not every creator. And I think that's too hard for us at scale. I can't run a whole newsroom being like, I've made up some rules. Like, it has to be simple and it has to be simple for the audience.

58:56Yeah. All right, we have a few more quicker ones that are less about Nelai's feelings about ads. Let's just plow through these before we get to take a break. Let me play you a couple. This, I think, might have been my favorite question we got this entire time. Hey, Vilscasters. I've been listening to your podcast for forever and I've always wondered what exactly happened during ad breaks. Do you chat for five minutes and then return? Or do you resume recording immediately? Thanks. do people want to know neil i'm so sad about this this is a real we're gonna destroy your suspension of disbelief i'm really sorry about this like i i don't want to tell you we don't know we just say okay we got to stop and then we hit a button to pause the recording and then another button to start again we just keep going sometimes we get seltzers i would say that's like the main ad break activity is, is a beverage.

59:51But the show is not recorded in real time. There are people out there who want us to do the Vergecast live more. I would say that's a thing we will probably do occasionally, but there are people who are like, I want the unedited live version of the Vergecast. And I'm like, it would blow your mind. No, you don't. Yeah. We just are like, we should take a break. All right. We're back. Like literally in the same breath, I say those words sometimes. Yeah. All right. That's a good one. All right. This is like finding out that they do Jeopardy all in one day and they just change their clothes like I was heartbroken.

1:00:26OK, I had a friend very recently who won several episodes of Jeopardy in a row and I've only gotten like bits and pieces of the process of how they do it. And it is it was like 100 years ago. He filmed like a week's worth of stuff in an afternoon, like just insane. And it has ruined Jeopardy for me forever. I don't even it's fine, but I hate it. I can't watch it anymore. The only thing I will say about Jeopardy, one more thing about Jeopardy, I'm not prone to believe conspiracies exist because often too many people have to keep a secret. Right? Like, we landed on the moon, and I know we landed on the moon because not enough people could keep the secret if we faked the moon landing for this long.

1:00:59Agreed. And then you're like, they keep Jeopardy a secret for a long time. And you're like, hmm, what are the drones doing over New Jersey? Like, that's fully where my head goes every time. I don't know. I picture Jeopardy as like a fully autonomous show. So there's like the room is just always there recording and people just come in and make a show sometimes. And the people who know, like never leave the room. Exactly. Yeah, they live there. It's fine. To any of our listeners who enjoy the Great British Bake Off, do not look up how they make that show. It will ruin it for you. Yeah. That's good.

1:01:29You asked us what we do during the ad breaks and now we've ruined a baking show. We're doing great. We're so sorry. All right. Next up. Hi, Verge Gas. John Rokos here. Two things for you. at first, ever since you started doing all these additional podcasts, it's like, it's like so many podcasts. I loved it so much better when it was concise and it was just, just the Friday episode. Cause now it's super hard for me to keep up with my other podcasts because all these podcasts are so good. I just subscribed. I love you guys. Keep up the great work. Thank you. So I wanted to pick this one because this is a question we've gotten a bunch, which is basically like we do a lot more Vergecast than we used to.

1:02:05and that is part of what you brought me here to do a couple of years ago. Do you want to explain how we think about the Vergecast now? Yeah, I mean, part of the answer is it's your job to figure it out. But the thing that I'm reacting to most is the idea that we used to be concise. I don't know if you listened to our first album. That was like a quadruple-sided prog rock exploration. It was not concise. Sandinista is what we made. I remember the early days of The Verge. We would record in the studio, in our office, at 4 o 'clock, and we would leave at like 6.30, like physically exhausted at the end of some episodes.

1:02:45I was like, I can't talk anymore after this episode. Yeah. So I appreciate that over the haze of time, concision has been added to our list of qualities. I actually think having more episodes lets us be more focused because we're not trying to cram every idea into one thing. And really, as you run a media company of whatever size, you start to realize you have to make more focused products. Things have to go find their audiences. Our TikTok channel doesn't really look anything like our homepage, and our homepage doesn't really look anything like our YouTube channel. And that's just how it goes.

1:03:22And for the podcast in particular, I think we know that the Friday show has a big audience that does not want us to mess with it too much. and there's just too much to fit into this show. And the Tuesday show is allowed to tell more narrative kinds of stories and build its own audience that wants a different kind of thing. So my recommendation to anyone who thinks you're doing too much podcast is figure out what you want from us and that we have probably provided it to you. And that's a way for us to grow the audience as opposed to just extracting more from the audience we have. And that's really what we're after is we want to grow our audience, particularly like new audience people have not encountered us before we want to go find them with stories that are interesting and bring them into the fold and you do that with focus yep that's a good answer i have no notes david's like i'm doing three more episodes yeah listen eight days a week first guess here we go uh all right one more and then we're gonna take a break hey this is leo calling from beautiful holland michigan hey i got a question about the verge cast meta episode and maybe a little bit of an axe to grind hey i'm wondering you guys a couple years ago went through all the work to make this beautiful redesign and rebrand of the theme song and all that.

1:04:31I'm an audio podcast listener, so maybe this isn't true on the YouTube version, but you guys have this great theme song, and then a year or two later, you chopped it down, so we just had bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, which is a little bit of a bummer. And now, for the last month or two, it's just been bum, bum, bum, bum, welcome to the Verge cast. And what's the deal? Do you think we don't have the attention span for it? Is this the TikTokification of the show? Love to hear your thoughts about why the theme song's been trimmed. Thanks, guys, of the show. Yeah, Liam, why has the theme song been trimmed?

1:05:02Good question. He was close with the TikTokification. It's not quite TikTok, though. It's YouTube. We want the YouTube to match the audio feed. And on YouTube, starting out with a big, long theme song is just kind of, you know, not something people will sit through. So we made a compromise and shortened it down. But I think this person's right. I don't really like it either. So Eric, our audio engineer, and I, we're going to go back to the drawing board and see what we can do with our theme song to refresh it and not be so jarring, for lack of a better word. That's the third episode every week is just the full theme song.

1:05:37We should just publish it once a week. There you go. I love that. Yeah. Can we sell ads against that? We had a lot of fun. Breakmaster Cylinder, who also did the Decoder theme song, did the revamped Vergecast theme. I don't – this is just some lore. Josh Sapolsky wrote the Virchias theme, and really we were listening to that MGMT song that everyone liked. You can see there's a direct line of inspiration there. So then we had that one. It was great. And then we didn't have the stems. Josh, he just made it on his computer. And he's like, here's the thing. We made it. All lost in the midst of time.

1:06:09So we had to redo it so we could do all the stuff David's doing on the Tuesday episodes with music beds and stuff. We just needed more stuff. So this was a good time to make more stuff. and it was really fun to work with Breakmaster Cylinder and I've always been worried that we made it too aggressive. Like it's a cool thing to listen to but like there's like a saxophone break in it. Yeah. Which you, if Memory Serves, specifically requested in the theme song. I did. It was my idea to have a saxophone break in it. So I think it's good. I like that people like it but that's just the lore of it is like literally Josh made the original theme in GarageBand like overnight and all lost to the mists of time.

1:06:53Like, I've asked him. It's just gone. It's not going to come back. So we just needed to remake it, and we had an opportunity to do it. We should use it more, though, because it is very good. It is very good. And by the way, if you want to blame YouTube for it, you should, but you should specifically blame YouTube music and the way that it interacts with YouTube and just the truly insane way that YouTube has approached podcasts. But that is for another show. All right, we've got to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to grab back our way through the rest of these questions.

1:07:18We'll be right back.

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1:08:16Download today.

1:08:40place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you could save versus the other big guys at cmobile.com slash switch. All right, we're back with Nealai Patel. We have some more questions. Nealai took one sip of water during that ad break. No, we talked for five minutes. Nealai and I sat for five minutes and listened to the ads. All right, let's run through a few more. So this is kind of a grab bag set of questions. We got a lot of people who just have questions about The Verge, how we work, how we're thinking about things. So we're just going to, we're going to plow through a bunch of them as fast as we can.

1:09:14Sound good? Yeah. Fabulous. All right. Here's the first one. Hey guys. Now that The Verge has gone subscription, you've got me wondering about The Verge redesign again. I make websites and digital products and things for a living and the redesign was kind of huge. It kind of felt a little bit like Ben Thompson's aggregation theory of like aggregating stuff from other sources and pulling the value into your own homepage. And I'm curious how it works. Just like, as a person, who does this for a living? Did it work? To what extent did it work? Should I apply this same theory to other websites? A lot of any insights you can give.

1:09:48Thanks. Bye. So we got a couple versions of this question. So just to make it very slightly broader than this, the question we got several times was essentially, it's been a little over two years since our redesign. We've done the subscription, which is obviously another huge change to what The Verge is doing. Looking back, did the redesign work? Yes. And it's actually really funny you mentioned Ben Thompson because when we launched the redesign, he was like, oh, that's aggregation theory. And I went onto his podcast and talked about it for an hour. Nice. Because that is exactly what it is. If you have a big direct audience that you are already serving, the easiest thing to do is make the product more useful.

1:10:25And I actually got this idea in a pretty tangential way. We had done a bunch of surveys about how people felt about different tech companies. and the most loved tech companies were Google and Amazon every year that we ran the survey. And Apple is actually kind of at the bottom of the list of the big tech companies. And we were just like trying to figure out why. And it's like, oh, these are utilities. People use Google and Amazon every single day. And they kind of don't. They just like use to hold their iPhones to use Google. And that probably shaped a bunch of our coverage, but it also shaped a bunch of our product thinking, which is people come to our homepage every day and we should make it as useful as possible.

1:10:58And then people will come back. and this has come up also with blue sky recently and the way they treat links like i think they've been pretty open like we're part of the web we will send you away because we know if we send you away to high quality things you are more likely to come back yep that the same idea we've had the whole time we will send you away we are happy to link out we're happy to link to our competitors we have some ideas about how to make that more seamless in a world of paywalls stay tuned. But we just know that making our own product more useful after two years has worked. Time spent on our homepage has gone up by minutes.

1:11:39No one can move that number. It is an impossible number to move on almost every product and our redesign accomplish it because there's just more to look at and more places to go and then people come back. Yeah, the idea of a homepage was like an open question not very long ago. I mean, like one of the things we talked about, you showed me the very early versions of this before I came back. And I had come from a place where we were having genuine conversations about like, is it even worth having and caring for a homepage? And I think I would say both history and the rest of the media industry has proven homepage is pretty much correct the last couple years.

1:12:15And not to harp on this because David hears me harp on this all the time, but it is just about owning your own distribution, right? This is why people have email newsletters. They can email it to you directly and there's not an algorithm between you and the audience. Our homepage is just us. Here's a feed of stuff we liked. And you can come look at our list of things that we liked. And people, I think people enjoy that because they know that we made it, not the Facebook algorithm made it or the X algorithm made it or whatever. So there's some value there. I don't know if that's the thing you can just like cold start because it only works if you have an audience.

1:12:48It might work if you can communicate to a big enough audience that this is what you're doing. in those continual value there. But the idea that your product should directly be the most valuable thing that you make and you can show it to people, then you don't let someone else's distribution get in the way. That is everywhere in media right now. Right. That is every newsletter author. That is every homepage redesign that you're seeing. It's, oh, we got to take control of our distribution. Yeah, totally agree. All right. Next up, we have a question from Clemente who says, I'm a huge fan of The Economist and I especially love their print editions.

1:13:22There's something quite different sitting down with a nice thick magazine with a bunch of amazing art. You guys could take a page from The Onion and come out with a couple of editions a year, maybe including your best long form pieces. Would The Verge ever come out in print? We're the last website on earth. Could we ever be print? That's Clemente's question. And we have, I want to excuse things like content goblins, which is amazing. Yeah, we've made a lot of games over the past year. But like, I think the question is like an ongoing sort of serious print product of our journalism. Is that a thing you'd ever be interested in?

1:13:54Will we print out the website and mail it to you several times a year? But like pretty. Pretty. Yeah. Maybe. Like the world's most qualified maybe. And the qualifications are a number of things have to go our way in unlikely directions for that to be worth our time. I want to do it, which is why it's a maybe. I think it would be really fun. And I've only ever worked in digital media and I've always just been jealous of print covers. Everybody who's listened to the show has heard me say, I just want to circle things around. I watch David Haskell, the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine. He really does just print out the thing and like, look at the layouts.

1:14:33That's awesome. It's cool. It's a lot of work. Like closing every issue of New York Magazine. We watch them do it. They work on the floor just above us in the New York office. It's a lot of work. and it that's a 50 year old legendary magazine and work is worth it we would have to just start all that from scratch and so maybe we can do it in some small ways maybe we can do more regular zines maybe and build our way up to it that's that's the set of unlikely things that has to break our way it there's nothing stopping us from doing it's just a whole other set of work that you know time is a zero-sum commodity like we would just have to stop doing some other work to do that.

1:15:12Yeah. All right. I would personally love to do it just because I want back at Wired they used to have like a row of vertical touchscreens and they would put a page up on each one and literally like page through the whole magazine on the, it was awesome. I want that so bad. I don't think it worked but it was cool. They didn't seem to do any work they just showed it to people and that was awesome. All right. Next question. We're going to do two more and then I'll let you get out of here. Here is one that I very much enjoyed. It's a particularly Neelai question. Hello, my name is Nick. I'm calling from Minnesota.

1:15:49This is a question for the meta, lowercase m, how does the Verge cast or the Verge work episode? Neelai often says that the Verge is like a Montessori and he just lets people pursue their passions. But I would like to know a little bit more about the nuts and bolts of that. There obviously must be some check-ins and how do you make sure people are moving forward on projects or choosing the right projects or pursuing passions that are relevant to your audience. I am finishing a master's degree in organizational leadership. So these types of people management and organizational development questions are really interesting to me.

1:16:32I'd also like to know how has that shifted as The Verge has grown, right? It's easy to run a Montessori-style team when you have a team of six and maybe harder when there's a team of, I don't know, 100 or something. Anyway, bye-bye. I did a decoder question for you. Oh, boy. Yeah, if you'd like to hear me contend with that question, I spend an hour a week doing therapy with CEOs. And that's all that show is. Yep. How do I do this? Can you tell me? Do you know? Do you know how you're doing it? And the answers are often much more appealing than anyone wants them to be. It was easier at the beginning.

1:17:07that's actually the first thing uh you know there's still a handful of co-founders on our team sean hallster thomas ricker like we're all here david was like employee number one i think all of us remember when it was like 15 people in one room and we solved every decision by all yelling at each other yep because no one had kids that's that's all we did like that's 24 hours a day in one room yelling at each other and that's how we did everything and there was a purity to that. I think it came out in the product. I think you could see it in the product. It came out in the stress levels. Uh, certainly, uh, it came out in the alcohol use.

1:17:43Um, that is totally not scalable. I, like I have as much fond recollection of our startup days as anyone. It was fun. It was, you can't run an organization that way. And even if you're doing the startup days, you still should stop it as soon as you can. Um, that's just not how to do it. So much bigger and we're totally distributed. We're not even all in the same room anymore. So we have had to come up with a bunch of other ways to communicate what we're doing and why we're doing it and how we do it. I think the job as the editor-in-chief is just scaling taste. Like all a publication is is a taste.

1:18:22At the end of the day, that's all it is. Like that's what matters. But here's some stuff that's in, here's some stuff that's out. That's the whole publication. So for us, it's just a lot of conversations about that. why is this a Verge story and is this good enough are the only two questions I think I consistently ask. Everything else is kind of just like on the margin like tactical like did you talk to this person or have we written a good headline but the two questions we come back to that the whole team is kind of always asking is why is this a Verge story and is this good enough and if you get everyone doing that all the time you don't have to police it right because everyone knows that they're allowed to ask those questions to each other and that they should know the answers and the answer to is this good enough is almost always no right right Like, that's the right answer to that question.

1:19:04And then it's like, well, wait, we have to get it out the door. Like, we're in a race. We got to get the story out the door. We'll fix it later or something. Or it's, I need to go back and make it better. And as long as everyone agrees that those are the shape of those questions and that you should be prepared to answer them, then you're fine. Like, you can really trust everyone to go as fast as they can because at the end of the day, everyone is asking themselves those questions and prepared to ask one another those questions. Yeah, that's pretty good. And yeah, for more, listen to Neil, I talk on Decoder just incessantly all the time.

1:19:31How do you do this? Yeah, you joke that you started doing that show to learn how to manage, and it feels more and more true every episode. But the thing that you're realizing is that no one is good at it. And so it's like, I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse. Do you have a plan? What is it? Can you say it out loud? Something about doors and decisions. That's all I know. All right, last one, and then I'm going to let you go. This is a question from Jeffrey. This is going to sound like a really self-aggrandizing way to end this, but this is a question we actually get a lot, and I think it's interesting to answer.

1:20:05Jeffrey says, What can we all do to ensure the viability, longevity, and success of The Verge? Obviously, the simple answer is subscribing, but I think it's worth it to remind your loyal audience about the need to support the website, whether through subscribing or other methods. I have the site bookmarked and check it several times a day, consuming ads and giving you clicks and theoretically some amount of revenue and bypassing the Google search algorithm and the associated ills. Are there other metrics that help you show your reach and popularity that Verge lovers should be using? Do article shares matter?

1:20:28Should I click every affiliate link just to help you out? Should I be following my favorite Verge writers and other social media, X, Blue Sky, Mastodon, et cetera? First of all, Jeffrey, I love you for asking this question. Yeah. And second of all, this is a question we get a lot and I think goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of like, people want the stuff that they like to succeed, right? It's why people cheer on their creators for getting brand deals. It means you get to keep doing this, right? Like we want our favorite teams to win. What does that look like for the Verge?

1:20:55throwing out give us$50 a year which you should do come be part of the community and comment mean things on all of Nealai's stories what else goes on that list for you I've just come to accept that our competitors are not other publications they are creators I think that's fine I hope you've heard me say over and over again I wish them all the best I think some of them do excellent work I hope they're even I hope all of them are successful on their own terms and they build their own businesses and everyone does a great job and has a good time. We make something different, right? And that's fine.

1:21:32Like our product is differentiated from the creator ecosystem by dint of the fact that we have our own distribution, that we have whatever traditional journalistic ethics policy, all this stuff. The thing that I think would help us the most in that ecosystem is by having the same kinds of audiences that creators have that are talking about them And like, if you look at the comment section, like a robust dialogue about what the creator is doing and why they're doing it. And like they evangelize for the people. And I don't know that any media organizations have contended with that fact. Like as a group, the journalism industry has been too high and mighty for too long.

1:22:15That is just a failure. I see that failure. I perceive that failure very clearly. I think most people perceive that failure. And you kind of have the Jeff Bezos of the world being like, you trust the media less than Congress, the media will have even less of an opinion now. Right. That's what he's doing with the Post. Right. Patrick Soon-Chang at the LA Times, billionaire owner of the LA Times, is going to add a bias meter to their stories, an AI-powered bias meter to their stories. So you can push a button and read the other version, the unbiased version of the story. This is the most undercutty thing you can do to a newsroom possible.

1:22:49Yeah. These are just reactions to the idea that people don't trust the media. Okay. I think those are wrong, especially for our kind of newsroom, which is inherently evaluative. Like, we hold the phone, and I'm like, seven. There's no, there it is. Like, there's straightforwardly, we're like, this is bad, like, all the time. So I think it's better for us to say we're in a relationship with your audience, and it's going to be the same kind of personal relationship, for lack of a better word, parasocial relationship, where we're real people. that you know and we're accountable to you the way that creators i think feel accountable to audiences on these platforms there's a lot of dynamics in there that i think are are hard but what i'm boiling my answer down to is like you should care about us you should communicate with us you should communicate to other people about why what you're getting from us is different or hopefully better than what you're getting from everything else because that's really at the end i don't want to do a bunch of marketing about our ethics policy i want to have an audience it's like Like this ethics policy is important to us and see more places try to copy it to increase the quality of the media that people consume.

1:23:56That's a big goal. I just can't do that on my own. And that's, I think, the way you can help. But also like follow us on Blue Sky, right? Yeah, but yeah. But also buy every affiliate product. I don't even know how that works. Well, I do that. Just send me a check personally. I actually think that's the one you shouldn't do. I think if you send Eli a personal check, he has to give it back. I will read your name on the show. But yeah, the high-minded thing that is in the back of my head all the time is if we are successful doing it this way, we might push some people to try and copy how we talk about our ethics policy and the making of the journalism and the independence.

1:24:37You can see it with the independent newsletter folks. Right? It's happening over there. You can see it with the 404 Media. I'm not saying I'm copying this, but you can see that there's a response to the void of that stuff by talking about it more. And I'm just sort of hopeful that if we can build audiences that openly say in the market, this is the thing we like, then there will be more supply of it. That's pretty good. All right. You need to go. Yeah, I quit. That was my last day. David's in charge now. He's going to read all the ads. Let's go. post red ads forever. Yeah, Neelai, we got lots more questions so we'll find some other time to keep going through some of these things but thank you to everybody who emailed and called and keep stuff coming.

1:25:26We got lots of stuff left to do, lots of stuff to figure out on the subscription, lots of new ideas about Vergecast stuff. If you want me to read more ads, tell Neelai. It won't work but you can tell them anyway. Neelai, thank you as always. Thank you. All right, before we go, Liam, come back just for one second. Sure. What's going on? We just made some CES plans. You know them better than I do. So tell the people what our CES plans are. Absolutely. The Verge will be back at CES this year. But what's special is that this year we're doing a live Vergecast. It's going to be on January 8th, which is the Wednesday of CES week.

1:26:01It'll be free and open to the public. And yeah, we're hoping to get a bunch of people out there to have a good time with us and just do live Vergecast and talk about CES. Where is it? Are we doing it at like the Vegas stadium with 60 ,000 people? No, we're going to be right on the strip. It's at the Las Vegas Brooklyn Bowl, of all places. There's a Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas? We're bringing New York to Vegas this year. There we go. I love it. Yeah, we have a couple more episodes between now and the end of the year, so we'll keep reminding y 'all. But if you're going to CES, it's Wednesday night.

1:26:33Come hang out with us. It's going to be very fun. I'm told there will be food provided. There will. Food and drinks. That's all that matters. All right, Liam, thank you. Of course. All right. that is it for the first cast today thank you to helen and nilai for being here and thank you for listening and thank you especially to everyone who called and emailed with questions people are always like oh why do you do these meta shows does anyone care and frankly i wonder this sometimes too but it's so fun hearing the stuff that you guys want to know and understand and are thinking about and care about and are engaging with us on and we're still figuring all of this stuff out as we go to, right?

1:27:10So this is a super fun thing to get to do with all of you. And I'm so, so grateful for everyone who did it. This is one of my favorite Virgie traditions that we do on this show. And I'm incredibly grateful for everyone who is part of it with us. So thank you. There's lots more on our subscription, on our business, on all of the stuff that we've been talking about at thevirge.com. Nilay's note that he wrote when we first launched the subscription last week, I think puts a lot of this in a really good perspective. So I'll make sure that's in the show notes. Keep it locked on the website. Tell us what you want from the podcast.

1:27:43Tell us what you want from the subscription. Tell us what you want from the verge. We're here doing this with you. And we want to keep hearing from you. So like I said, you can always call the hotline at 66 verge one one. Ask questions that way. Email us vergecast at the verge.com. If I'm being completely honest, I in particular have been bad about checking the email recently, because it just got overrun with spam at one point, and it became kind of annoying to dig through every single day. But I actually think we solved the spam problem. I've been better at checking it recently. So keep the emails coming.

1:28:11We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about somehow the fact that there is still news in mid-December as we wind towards the holidays. Plus, we have some other fun stuff planned between now and the end of the year. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:28:43And Doug. Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu, is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.

From the publisher

A week ago, The Verge launched a subscription. And you had questions! So we have answers. The Verge’s Helen Havlak and Nilay Patel join the show to talk about how we priced the subscription, why ad-free podcasts are hard to do, Apple News, what we do during ad breaks, and much more. And if we didn’t answer your question, let us know! Call the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11, or email vergecast@theverge.com, with all your questions. Thanks to everyone who sent them in!

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