Vox Media - Gloss Australia

The Verge introduces metered paywall.

Update: The paywall has launched. Via Semafor:

Editor-in-chief Nilay Patel told Semafor that the move was intended to drive additional revenue and insulate The Verge from changes made by social media platforms[...]

“I think it’s a tragedy that garbage is free and news is behind paywalls. I don’t want to make that worse,” Patel said. “I think that The Verge homepage and our news coverage serves a central utility function in our ecosystem.”

The website also hints at future integrations with ActivityPub and Bluesky in an effort to take the focus away from SEO and social-media traffic and make The Verge homepage a platform of its own.

Early benefits include unlimited access to posts, such as paywalled newsletters and metered product reviews and features, limited ads on all Verge content and a physical limited edition magazine. Also the original decentralised solution, RSS, is available to subscribers, with unabridged posts available through RSS readers.

Original post:

According to Semafor, Vox Media's technology website The Verge is going behind a paywall. Some content will remain free:

Beginning this week, the Verge will charge $7/month or $50/year for comprehensive access to the site as well as the already-paywalled newsletters Command Line and Notepad.

Some content and the publication’s homepage, which was redesigned in 2022 to resemble a social feed, will remain free. The Verge is Vox Media’s third major subscription push behind New York and Vox, which launched a membership program earlier this year.

Everything old is new again at Vox Media, which will also be introducing an app for its publication New York Magazine, focused on digital NY Mag subscribers:

It will be the magazine’s second crack at a mobile app; New York first launched an iPhone app in 2016.

The Verge considers paywall.

From Oliver Darcy's media newsletter Status:

As part of the effort, the Jim Bankoff-led digital media conglomerate — which houses widely recognizable brands such as New York magazine, Eater, Vox, SBNation, NowThis, Thrillist, and more — has started exploring the introduction of a pay wall on its popular technology website, The Verge, people familiar with the matter told me.

As Darcy also writes, The Verge has already experimented with some paid newsletters, which are published to The Verge as articles that require a subscription. This new offering could be a bundle and include additional bonus content.

This would fit with previous efforts to bring the focus of The Verge back to its homepage as a central way of accessing its content, as opposed to relying on social media links and SEO for traffic. From 2023:

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Polygon continues Vox Media’s switch to Wordpress.

“This migration rests on Vox Media’s front-end platform, Duet — first seen on The Verge, and then Vox.com — coupled with a new, more flexible backend in WordPress VIP,” says Polygon publisher Chris Grant. “Beyond just a redesign, this new site represents a fundamental shift in our product strategy, and our continued investment and confidence in websites and loyal audiences.”

Powered by its migration to WordPress VIP and Vox Media’s front end platform, Duet, Polygon will continue to build out its homepage and website, with new community tools aimed at boosting user experience to follow the redesign.

Vox.com redesign takes cues from The Verge, moves to Wordpress.

Nice post from Thomas Stang, Engineering Lead at Vox Media, on the transition from Vox Media's Chorus CMS to Wordpress. Some interesting tidbits:

Over the following months, shifts and changes in our teams made the task of migration ahead of us even more challenging, as we lost some exceptional teammates and institutional knowledge. Despite these setbacks, we began planning the migration. Duet would remain the front-end platform, supporting all brand sites migrating to WordPress using a decoupled architecture. This required refactoring Duet to source data from a completely different API.

Though Polygon was nearing completion, we decided to migrate Vox News as the first brand on WordPress. Vox had the least brand-specific CMS features, making it a strategic starting point. By migrating Vox first, we could develop the majority of the features used by Chorus brands, adding new functionality with each subsequent migration.

I honestly can’t imagine the migration process going any smoother than it did. In just seven months, we built an extensive feature set into WordPress, migrated all of Vox’s content and media library, implemented a comprehensive GraphQL API, completed development of our component library, refactored the front-end platform to use a new schema and API, and launched a new, redesigned brand site.

The redesign takes a lot of cues from The Verge's 2022 redesign, excluding the introduction of 'Quick Posts'. Verge Editor in Chief Nilay Patel has previously expressed interest in integrating The Verge with ActivityPub.

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Gloss is hosted by Compiled on the Ghost CMS and will definitely also be adding ActivityPub support as soon as their integration launches.