The Verge, a tech news site founded in 2011 and owned by Vox Media, erected a paywall for the first time on Tuesday in an announcement from editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. A subscription to The Verge will set you back $7 per month or $50 per year, according to Patel, who says that a “surprising number” of readers were asking for this change.
“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,” Patel wrote in a statement posted online. Patel did say that “big chunks” of the site will still be available for free but didn’t go into detail.
Patel laid out his argument for a Verge paywall by noting some of the big shifts that have happened in recent years.
“If you’re a Verge reader, you know we’ve been covering massive, fundamental changes to how the internet works for years now,” Patel wrote. “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.”
There’s no doubt that Patel is right about the changes, especially those scams that we here at Gizmodo have been covering endlessly. But are people actually looking for a paywall? Patel writes that “we’ve actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work.” And while that’s a nice sentiment from loyal readers, it’s still unclear whether it’s the trick to sustaining a news website in the 2020s.
Patel points to the number of online-only news sites that have collapsed in recent years. BuzzFeed News won awards for its news coverage but shut down in 2023. Vice News folded in a similar fashion earlier this year, though it looks like that effort is being slowly resurrected with more Trump-friendly slop.
While Patel’s arguments for the move to a subscription sound reasonable given the digital media landscape here in late 2024, it’s hard not to feel like the open internet we all grew up with is slowly dying when a new site puts up a paywall. Most people will never subscribe and simply find their news elsewhere. Or, as seems to be increasingly the case with some of the youngest Americans, they simply won’t read news at all.
Some of The Verge’s content will remain free, according to Patel, but original reporting, reviews, and feature stories will all get pushed behind the paywall. And people who subscribe won’t see the ads that others will experience each time they visit The Verge.
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