✉️ Feedback on the The Verge Subscription

The excellent tech website, The Verge, just launched a subscription – which I know they’ve worked on for a while.

Generally, I think the way they’ve approached it seems pretty sensible – but I still have some feedback. And hopefully, the fact that I’ve subscribed for a year will increase the odds of it getting better, and not decrease it.

Some quotes from the launch, to get you up to speed

All the emphasises are mine – meant to guide you towards the most important parts.

Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It’ll cost $7 / month or $50 / year — and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we’ll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design.

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in. So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free.

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay. Subscribers will also get full access to both Command Line and Notepad, our two premium newsletters from Alex Heath and Tom Warren, which are packed full of scoops every week.

Our vision has always been to build The Verge like a software product, and we have a big roadmap of features to come, like a true dark mode toggle, the ability to personalize the homepage feed, and a lot of wacky ideas about what it might mean to follow authors, topics, and streams across the site and — eventually — decentralized social platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

In general, it seems OK

I get that most people want “everything online to be free all the time”. But if you want people to do high-quality journalism,¹ they need a way to do it while putting food on the table. And I think a freemium model, of sorts, seems like a good way to go about it.

Some problems with only going ad-supported:

• It doesn’t align the incentives of the writers and readers as cleanly,
• and it makes most people subsidise the product (by seeing ads and worsening their privacy) for the people who’s just saying “Nah, I’ll just harden my LibreWolf and block all the ads, to make sure the people making the content I want, doesn’t benefit at all from me consuming it.”

If you’re against this move and want to read stuff from The Verge, I’d love to hear how you envision the creators should benefit from you consuming what they make.

Some feedback, though:

The biggest, is that I absolutely think paying should get rid of all the ads. No mucking about.

One of the benefits they list, is a full-text RSS feed. But if this isn’t included already, I want an option to also get it without the sponsored/affiliate posts, like Apple’s AirTags are cheaper than they’ve ever Benn for Cyber Monday. Firstly, these are ads as well. Secondly, as a Norwegian, these are relevant about 0% of the time. I think they always categorise them as Deals – so shouldn’t be too hard.

I also think they need to offer ad-free podcast feeds.

The print magazine

From the launch post:

(…) and for a limited time, if you sign up for the annual plan, we’ll send you an absolutely stunning print edition of our CONTENT GOBLINS series, with very fun new photography and design.

Now, guess if it’s possible to get this magazine if you live outside of North America (even if you’d pay for shipping)… And guess if you get a further discount instead if you’re not eligible for this reward, or if you have to pay the same price as those who do get it…

I don’t love that it now feels like I’m subsidising rewards I’m not eligible for.

Open standards

From the launch post again:

Most major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do.

I wholeheartedly agree with this point – and that is why I love that they embrace open standards like RSS (for both text and podcasts), and good ol' links.

However, the reason the things they mentioned in the quote happens, is that it often doesn’t make sense, from a business perspective, to support open standards. So, if I’m to renew my subscription, I want them to make good on their promises to also invest in open social media.

And even though I like several of the ideas behind Bluesky and the AT Protocol, I think, when we’re fighting an uphill battle for openness, improving the W3C standards is better than fragmentation. In other words, I want them to spend “my money” on ActivityPub – even though other things could make more business sense. The ability to do that, comes with people being willing to pay you out of loyalty.

Some ideas on how to do it

I absolutely don’t mind them having a presence on other platforms/protocols! But I think they should base things around ActivityPub.

I’m sure they’ve cooked up plenty of possibilities on the inside – but I wanted to provide some thoughts anyway:

• I don’t think they should do something like hosting a Mastodon instance open to the public,²
• but having a server³ so we can follow accounts like @nilaypatel@verge.social, @frontpage@verge.social, and @liveblog@verge.social⁴ would be great.
• I also want the Quick Posts to be native ActivityPub posts, that I can get in my timeline.
  • (If posts are this, I would use ActivityPub services as the main “comment section” – but that’s just me.)
• Micro.blog could serve as an inspiration (or you could just use the service⁵) for setting up the Quick Posts: Users can follow the account directly – but you can also set up automatic cross-posting to numerous services.⁶

The biggest thing for me, is that I think The Verge’s main home should be their website (they got that right) – while the hub for their social presence (both for brand stuff, journalists, and readers) is based around ActivityPub. In time, I’m sure Threads users would be able to follow these accounts! And with even more time, they can probably be bridged into Bluesky as well! But again: I don’t mind cross-posting elsewhere.

I get the notion that creators (of all kinds) have to “be where the audience is”. But if you have “a massive loyal audience despite industry-wide declines in Google referrals and big social platforms downranking links” and “the most popular single page at all of Vox Media”, you can influence where the audience is!

Some people, and organisations, are in a position where they can choose to put their thumb on the scale – and push the web towards a better future. A future where network effects aren’t hostage effects, where you can follow people from your preferred platform, and where creators can move without losing everything they’ve built up.

The Verge, and Nilay Patel specifically, now that you have the subscription revenue of people like me, I hope you do your part to promote the web I know you want as well. I’m not saying The Verge has been, or is being, bad for the health of the web. I’m only saying you can be better. And especially after this change.