Good morning,

This week’s Stratechery interview is with Nilay Patel, the founder and editor-in-chief of The Verge. This week The Verge launched a new redesign, and I think it’s really interesting. Patel wrote in his introductory post:

Our goal in redesigning The Verge was actually to redesign the relationship we have with you, our beloved audience. Six years ago, we developed a design system that was meant to confidently travel across platforms as the media unbundled itself into article pages individually distributed by social media and search algorithms…But publishing across other people’s platforms can only take you so far. And the more we lived with that decision, the more we felt strongly that our own platform should be an antidote to algorithmic news feeds, an editorial product made by actual people with intent and expertise. The Verge’s homepage is the single most popular page at Vox Media, and it should be a statement about what the internet can be at its best.

So we sat down and thought about what was really important to us and how to make our homepage valuable every time you open it. We also thought about where we came from and how we built The Verge into what it is today. And we landed on: well shit, we just need to blog more.

So we’re back to basics with something we’re calling the Storystream news feed, right on our homepage. Our plan is to bring the best of old-school blogging to a modern news feed experience and to have our editors and senior reporters constantly updating the site with the best of tech and science news from around the entire internet. If that means linking out to Wired or Bloomberg or some other news source, that’s great — we’re happy to send people to excellent work elsewhere, and we trust that our feed will be useful enough to have you come back later. If that means we just need to embed the viral TikTok or wacky CEO tweet and move on, so be it — we can do that. We can embed anything, actually: I’m particularly excited that we can directly point people to interesting threads on Reddit and other forums. The internet is about conversations, and The Verge should be a place to find great conversations.

I had the chance to talk with Patel about the thinking that went into this new approach, which, as you will be able to tell from the conversation, I think is very smart. We also talk about Patel’s background and how that connects to his career in tech journalism, The Verge’s business model and approach to journalism ethics, and have a bit of a debate about moderation and net neutrality.

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On to the interview:

An Interview With The Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel About Building a Destination Site

This interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Patel v. University of Chicago

Nilay, I am excited to chat. It’s an appropriate time and not just because you dropped your annual iPhone review — it’s always good to see you writing again, even if it seems to only happen once a year. But you did not write once a year, you actually wrote twice this week because your first article this week was about The Verge’s big redesign, which I want to talk about.

But before I get to that, I always like to take these opportunities to learn more about whoever I’m talking to and this feels particularly pressing because I’m talking to a fellow Wisconsinite, a fellow Packers fan. So how did you end up make it from Racine, Wisconsin to being the head of The Verge?

Nilay Patel: Oh boy, the beginning. I grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. I went to college, the University of Chicago, and the reason I bring that up is that my first year of college was when Napster came out. I’m starting at Napster, that’s what I’m doing!

I think we must be the same year then.

NP: Yeah. I graduated college in 2003.

Oh, I was 2002, okay.

NP: So in 1999, Napster comes out, it’s my first year of college and the University of Chicago IT department throttles Napster on the campus network. We all had towers hooked into ethernet, so this seemed very unfair, and I went on the war path. I said, “You can’t be doing this. I’m paying a lot of money for this network, for this university”, and I got most of the education that I needed right then in that fight. Here’s this big organization, here’s copyright law, here’s the politics of networking and that was when my entire career path changed, and I decided I very much wanted to be a copyright lawyer.

So I went off to law school at Wisconsin and became a copyright lawyer, which I immediately and completely hated. It’s other people’s paperwork and I respect every lawyer out there, but I wanted to do stuff, and I got a job on the side writing blog posts for a website called Engadget for $12 a post. I used to stand in my shower every morning and figure out how many blog posts I had to write a day to quit being a lawyer.

And it was a lot.

NP: It was a lot of blog posts. I got a raise along the way and it was like $18 a post.

Were you mostly writing about copyright law when you started and then you branched into doing other stuff, or was it just “Hey, whatever you want to write about, go ahead”?

NP: Engadget was about gadgets, but you go back to that period of time, it’s like 2006, 2007, the iPhone wasn’t out, all the gadget news was about music players. The copyright law background and the gadget news cycle were right on top of each other, so I found myself writing about gadgets and copyright law all the time, and I realized I had way more impact writing about the law than I would ever have actually practicing it. I worked for a very small law firm in Chicago, we represented a lot of kids who got sued for using Kazaa and we would basically just tell them, “You need to quit school for a semester, go work for the pizza place, pay this $5,000 settlement and move on with your life”, which is not a rewarding way to spend your time at work. You just quickly discover you have all this impact when you have an audience and in that moment at Engadget in 2007, our audience was on our platform, we had this robust commenting system.

Wait, wait. I want to get to this, no jumping ahead to the interesting pieces, but you mentioned that your whole career path changed in that fight. It’s interesting you say that because on one hand it changed in that you became a lawyer, which was kind of a dead-end from a career perspective. Is that what you’re referring to? Or are you referring to the overall caring about having an impact and realizing you can shift the needle? When you say everything changed, what was specifically that changed?

NP: I think all first year college students I wanted have an impact on the world.

Delusions of grandeur, we’ve all been there.

NP: (laughing) I was young, I was at school, it was great. I think what changed for me was the idea that someone could flip a switch on a router and change my experience of the culture. It was a very one-to-one — you just took away this thing I was using to listen to music and you did it for what I thought was obviously a bad set of reasons. Now I realize maybe the University had a point, I’m older, but that connection of, “Oh boy, I’m reading these court cases and it doesn’t seem like the courts understand what is about to happen because of computers”, which in 1999 was a real situation, and I’m listening to these university administrators who run the network talk about whether or not we should be able to share PDF files, but not MP3 files. It’s all bits and all of that just swirled in my head enough where my instinct was the way to have impact is to somehow guide this conversation, be in it. It wasn’t to guide the conversation in the beginning, it was “Go be a lawyer and go advocate and win the Supreme Court case”, and you become a lawyer and you realize the first thing you need is a client with a shitload of money if you want to go fight the Supreme Court.

It makes sense and you definitely see the line from there to here. I do have to update my timing because I was actually a year ahead of you, so when I started, we were still getting MP3s off of random FTP servers on the Internet. Then Napster, I think came out in the spring and — at Wisconsin you usually live in the dorms your first year and then you’d move off campus — me and my friends were just such a bunch of loser nerds that we actually stayed in the dorms a second year just for the network speed. We were like, “Oh my God, this is incredible. You’re not going to get this network speed outside the dorm so we’re staying here another year.” It shows what a loser I am!

The Verge and the iPhone

So anyway, so you jump forward, you’re at Engadget, you’re writing blog posts, you’re getting paid per post, and then the iPhone comes out. Did that transform Engadget or was that just another gadget along the way?

NP: I think the iPhone might have transformed everything.

Yeah.

NP: Some ancient history: Engadget had two sister sites at the time, one was called Engadget HD, which was about TVs and the other one was Engadget Mobile, which was about phones. The reason that they had Engadget Mobile was there was an audience for cell phone enthusiasts that was distinct from the audience for gadgets. Sony Ericsson would drop 45 models of cell phones and we would write about them all and the Engadget gadget audience would be like, “Why are you talking about phones? These are boring.” So they had split it off into another site, and the iPhone comes out and that was just the end of that. The total convergence of all things occurred.

That was one of the big things that I wrote about the iPhone when I first started Stratechery, was everyone was calling it disruption, and I’m like this isn’t disruption, you’re getting a more expensive device. The reason why it’s so impactful is it’s obscoleting all these other devices that you no longer need anymore, it’s all sort of wrapped into one thing and to your point, it obscoleted Engadget.

NP: Yeah. Wasn’t it Blackberry founders who were like “This thing disrupts the laptop and not the phone” and that’s the mistake they made and I think none of us saw it quite that way.

Well I think that’s true, but that was a secondary thing. That happened in the long run where phones basically took over computer usage and computers became very specialized. I feel like that was a popular explanation especially amongst the disruption apostles, which was a backwards excuse for why Clay Christensen was wrong about the iPhone.

NP: (laughing) Retcon disruption.

Exactly! It’s like, “Okay, yeah that’s true, but the real impact here is it had your MP3 player, you had your calculator” — look at what a loser I am, I’m talking about calculators, we’re getting a theme on this podcast here — “cameras, you had all these bits and pieces that you would carry around that were individual devices that all became one device”. It’s really fascinating to think about it from that gadget perspective. How long did it take Engadget Mobile and Engadget Engadget to become one site again?

NP: It took a while. The iPhone, that first year it was exclusive to AT&T, it didn’t have an app platform, it took a minute, and you have to remember just ancient history wise, the networking situation in the United States at that time was a disaster. I think our country is still trying to recover from Sprint choosing WiMAX.

Oh, yeah! I forgot about that.

NP: There are not four carriers in the United States right now because Sprint made a disastrous technological bet against the entire world and failed, you can just draw that thread out. So there was still a lot to cover on that side of the house, but the gadget of the iPhone slowly dominated Engadget, and once that happened and once all the other phones started coming out and they started being the point, that’s when our audience swelled. It exploded overnight, and then that’s when our opportunity to leave and start The Verge became crystal clear in our heads that even the name Engadget was somewhat limiting us because what we were inevitably going to cover was the downstream cultural effect of the phone.

That’s a really fascinating way to put it. I remember when you left Engadget and I think you had the intervening site, This Is My Next — which actually I liked the name, but The Verge is better — capturing this moment where if you think about gadgets, there’s some aspect, you mentioned Sony Ericsson’s like forty models, and they’re just spraying them out there and seeing what fits. Once the iPhone came along, then obviously Android came alongside it, it’s like this is clearly the paradigm and so there’s no more need to do a spray-and-pray or to look at all these gadgets, because it’s set. We’ve now moved past that. You see this in computing in general, you move up the stack as far as levels of abstraction goes and where competition is and this is something I’ve written about more previously about these things being in place. It strikes me as a very insightful understanding of how the market had flipped and I always assumed, I don’t have to get into why you left for The Verge or why it wasn’t Engadget, I could certainly imagine having a more entrepreneurial and control was part of that, but this story about there being an editorial angle to it really resonates with me and makes a lot of sense.

NP: There is more competition than I think we ever — in tech media, you kind of get myopically focused on wherever you are. Actually that’s why I like Stratechery, I know that you have a broader perspective because of where you live. In India, the gadget sites in India cover twelve to fifteen Android phone launches a week. There’s like ferocious hardware competition in some giant markets in the world, the same is true of Android handsets in China. So there’s an element here where things have converged, particularly in the United States and in Europe, things have really converged on just a handful of devices. Then there’s still a world where there’s ferocious hardware competition and what the hardware looks like and what it should do and how many SIM card slots it should have or whatever is still the basis of market competition because other parts of it have settled and that they’ve settled on Android or they’ve settled on WhatsApp or they’ve settled on one of the other super apps.

All that makes sense but none of that actually aligns with the Nilay Patel goal to change the world, right? You wanted to affect regulation and copyright and that doesn’t involve choosing the best Android phone.

NP: I think we could do the full hour on whether or not that’s true, because I do think one of our theses at The Verge overall is that more competition is better for consumers. One of the best criticisms of our site that I’ve ever gotten, which I took as a compliment, was “You’re never going to tell our side because you’re relentlessly focused on consumers.” It’s like, “Yeah, that’s what we do here”. We’re relentlessly focused on the experiences people have with technology and the idea that in every market, something gets fixed into something that looks like the standard and then you compete around the edges of it.

Knowing that it’s different in different markets actually allows you to be more critical of your own market. For me, the idea that there are only three carriers in the United States and they keep getting more expensive and the 5G experience here is not nearly as good as it is in other countries around the world or even the fixed broadband experience here is not nearly as good as it is where you are and Americans pay more money for lower speeds, it’s all the same. The thing I try to avoid is turning The Verge into a straight business site but there’s a big element of it where doing the sort of business and regulatory and policy coverage is the reason you can explain to a large consumer audience, “Well, this is why AT&T’s network lets you down all the time”.

Two things you mentioned there that were really interesting to me. Probably narcissistic of me given your massive scale and reach, but I’ve always felt like The Verge is a little bit of a sister site for me, just because we did start about the same time. I think you started in 2011, and when I was thinking about where Stratechery was in the market, I’m like, “Okay, The Verge has this consumer angle really nailed.” You’re writing about what matters to consumers, you have great product reviews, the stuff that you’ve always been good at, the stuff that you’re still doing, speaking of the iPhone, you obviously have the Wall Street analysts over here, and I’m going to try to sit in the middle, bridging those two gaps.

I like it for me because it worked out well, but what I like about for you is having this clarity of vision of, “This is what we’re going to deliver.” When you look back over the last ten years, I think it’s safe to say The Verge is probably — are you the single most successful digital-only publication out there? There’s probably a case to be made that that’s true.

NP: I think you have to figure out who fits in that definition and who doesn’t. But yeah, I hope so, I think we’re in that conversation, we certainly don’t have a print magazine or a cable channel. One thing that I am more and more cognizant of is that there’s a lot of wreckage along the way. Lots of things have started and gone away, and we have managed to persevere which I am very proud of.

The Verge Redesign

Here we can get to the redesign a little bit. You said in the introductory post:

When you embark on a project to totally reboot a giant site that makes a bunch of money, you inevitably get asked questions about conversion metrics and KPIs and other extremely boring vocabulary words. People will pop out of dark corners trying to start interminable conversations about ‘side doors,’ and you will have to run away from them, screaming.

I hate to say, you jumped on the wrong podcast for the wrong site if you didn’t want to talk about some of this stuff but I have you here, no screaming allowed! But it is really, really interesting, this site design. I’ll let you take the lead, explain to me your thinking and why it’s different than the site back in 2016. I went back and read your introductory note there and let’s just say there are a lot of differences, so I’ll let you start and then I have a bunch of questions about it.

NP: There’s a lot. I’ll rewind just one tick further to our launch in 2011. We launched in 2011, the phone that had just been announced was the iPhone 4S and we did not launch a mobile-first site. We had an app, but we had to make an app for eighteen different platforms, we had a BlackBerry app, it was crazy. Our site in 2011 was a desktop experience and we thought people would come to it and log into it and fill out a gadget database and we would have this all-encompassing relationship with everyone. Then phones got bigger, both in size and in import in the world and it wasn’t that we didn’t see it coming, it was just that we thought we were going to iterate through it.

But along the way, when we got to 2016 and that redesign, we were in this era of what I would call distributed publishing. Everyone thought the platforms were just going to eat the Internet, and that publishers, and I think you wrote about this as Faceless Publishers would deliver a lot of technology to people and you would unbundle your site and distribute article pages as Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles or whatever Snapchat has, and that was your life now. You would just have to go everywhere and be everywhere, because the platforms had the audience. When I was sucking up to you on Twitter yesterday, that’s Aggregation Theory, that is the Ben Thompson special, is that they now control the demand and you have to fight to be the best supply.

That was probably true in 2016 and then as we got to 2022, that era has somewhat come to a close. I’m not going to say it has totally come to a close, The Verge gets more traffic from platforms than not. Most websites get most of their traffic from platforms, most of their audience from platforms. But Facebook Instant Articles is gone. Facebook’s relationship with the news industry is all but dissolved. Google is enormous, but Google is keeping more and more of its traffic for itself, as every other company will tell you. And Twitter is going through whatever machinations of Twitter it’s going to go through from now until the end of time, and by the way, Twitter owes nobody any traffic of import.

So we just felt like, “What are we doing? Why are we trying to give ourselves away to these platforms that for six years have just not cared for us the way that we care for ourselves?” We were just looking at our data and it’s not that I don’t know our conversion metrics or KPIs, what I was trying to get across and what I was trying to rally our team against and just validate, was that we care more about how it feels. It’s a product — we make a product, The Verge is a product and I think most publishers forget that they’re shipping a software product to millions of people every day. It’s all a web page is, a piece of software. So we just needed to focus on how it felt, and whether it felt good and whether it was building a community unto itself.

There’s a bit about this, the “feel” part I think is important, but what strikes me from a business perspective is, on one hand it is interesting how this “Put content everywhere” strategy failed. We could interrogate to what degree did Facebook drop the ball? I think a significant amount. To what degree did other platforms make that not viable for their own various reasons.

But on the other hand, there is a concept I wrote about a long time ago called destination sites, where that was the holy grail. You want to be the site that people go to because they trust there’s going to be stuff there that they’re interested in, and that is how you can develop this direct connection with consumers. To me, when I was reading your introduction, it was just basically a flashing billboard that said, “We want to be a destination site.” To me, The Verge has always done well at that. Especially something like iPhone reviews, perfect example. I go to The Verge, I want the Nilay Patel article right away but just in general, when tech news happens, you’re always going to have coverage of it, that’s super useful.

Bringing back this blogging bit, or Storystream, where you’re going to not just have your list of articles, but also lean into linking out again, lean into just putting links to something else. That is counterintuitive because on one hand it’s like, “Oh, you’re sending people away. Does that work for an advertising site?” But it definitely makes a lot of sense if you want to be a site that people just go to voluntarily, they don’t find you through social media. That’s the big takeaway I got from your write-up.**

NP: I think that’s right. Here, I’ll give you the dumbest math of all. The Verge is unique, we have this very unique asset in all of publishing, we have a huge home page audience. Our home page is the most popular page at Vox Media, people come to it, they sit on it all day long. If you look at our old homepage, it’s like, “Why?” We had a publisher’s homepage, it was a really nice one, I liked it, we had one of the best ones, I think going. But it was static and so you’d refresh it, and we had pinned a bunch of stories that we thought were important at the top.

Right. You had to find the new thing on there, because it wasn’t super clear what that was or where it was.

NP: It was a magazine cover, more or less. A magazine cover with a feed underneath it. It was good, it was useful. People are telling me on Twitter they liked it very much.

(laughing)I saw the comments.

NP: Yeah, it’s fine. But it didn’t give you any value to come back. So I sat with our publisher, Helen Havlak, who is in charge of our business and it was like, “Well, if we can just get people to come back one more time a day, and give them something useful, we all get yachts.” If you start with a huge base and double it by getting one more visit a day by some massive fraction of those people, you’re good and that solves just a huge problem.

That connected very deeply to just this feeling that I personally had and Dieter Bohn, our former executive editor, had. That we run this website, but it’s easier to tweet, and that’s weird, that’s just a problem. Why am I working for them for free when I run my own huge website? Honestly that’s just the software experience. That’s what’s going on there, it’s not anything different than you just use the thing that’s nicer to use. So we just built that. The back-end of our system has always historically been very nice, but we built the quick post editor to fill out that story stream feed and it looks more or less like Twitter, with some tags and stuff so we can organize things. But it’s just a nicer experience, and it’s home. So we’re already seeing our reporters, instead of having some ornate social media policy, like a legacy publisher that forbids you from tweeting, we’re like, “We just built a really nice tool” and our reporters are like, “Yes, we would prefer to use this tool” because the value of it is very obvious to them.

So there’s just an element here where what we make is software, and so we should make good software, both for the people who create the work and for the audience that consumes it. Then just to more directly answer your question. The linking out to me is just — when I say we’re going to do old school blogging again, I built an old school blog by linking out. Engadget mostly linked out, we did very little original reporting, that was mostly reviews, that was our original reporting, we linked out to tons of reporting. But we built a community of people who trusted us to curate that world, and so there’s just a piece where we can bring that back, in this new newsfeed presentation that’s a little more modern and a little faster, a little more fun, but we can provide that voice. Every time you open The Verge, you know it’s going to be good because we are going to make it and you know that we’ll not have the noise of a social media platform. If we just fight that fight a little bit, if we can just up our self-esteem a little bit, and say our competition is Twitter instead of Wired. Even if we’re a little bit successful, we’re going to be really successful.

That’s such a good way to put it. “Our competition is Twitter, not Wired”, I think that gets it so right. The great thing, and you alluded to this in your piece, where on one hand you don’t have to have an internal debate about, “Do we write about this tweet, or do we summarize this story that someone wrote somewhere else?” so there’s an efficiency gain on your side. But to put it from a consumer perspective, the amount of valuable content I can get on The Verge by virtue of you just posting links, it dramatically increases the value from the page from my perspective, because now you’re basically piggybacking on everyone else. You’re making them work for you, instead of, you could argue with your old model, you were working for them and that’s what I think makes a ton of sense.

NP: The other way, the thing I’ve been saying is we can embed almost anything. So it’s like, “Oh, every CMS is my CMS now.” If the best thing to do to cover some story is to make a TikTok, our video team is just going to go off and make a TikTok and we’re going to put it on the front page, right there. We don’t have to write some extremely cringe-worthy container post. We’ll still do some of that stuff, but the games we were playing because we limited our understanding of what our formats were, I think just were incompatible with how people experience media today.

Now our video team has direct access to the homepage and if the right format is a TikTok video to cover a story, we can just do it and put it on the homepage and be done. What I want to say is “There hasn’t been enough innovation in publishing”, but the thing we invented is blog posts, which have been around forever. That’s why my joke is, “We’re going to revolutionize the media with blog posts”. We’re just going to bring back this extremely simple format, which is a reverse chronological feed of good stuff and that will help us grow and be more valuable to our audience. Once you have demonstrated sufficient utility to a big audience, it is likely that they will come back. That is basic, it’s foundational.

Business Model and Ethics

Well, you can make a whole bunch of money, which was the other phrase in that post. Talk to me about The Verge’s business model. What are the different components of it? Advertising, affiliate marketing. What are the different pieces and how do you think about that in the context of this new redesign?

NP: Helen is our publisher, she’s an amazing partner, she is in charge of our business. Our business is very good, I like working here a lot, it’s run by great people. But the basics are that we are an advertising-supported business. We have lines of revenue inside of that advertising business, so there is a direct display component, which is very important to The Verge.

Which lends itself to this destination idea.

NP: Yeah, and that’s a big chunk of what we do and we’re very protective of it. We have a great sales team, all that sort of thing. We have the company’s own programmatic advertising business, called Concert, it has a first-party data component called Forte so there’s a targeting thing. They’re going to be so happy I talked about Concert on this. I’m doing my best here, Concert runs across lots of publishers. We have a branded content business that distributes — Vox Media is really big. It has 18 editorial networks so all this stuff scales across to audiences. So we get pieces of all these networks, but all the networks have different mixes of what drives their primary revenue. Ours is direct display but then we get all these other lines of revenue, because the company runs them.

Then we have a tiny little beginnings of a consumer revenue business. We have one paid newsletter called Hot Pod, we acquired it, Nick Quah was running it, who I think you know. He came to work at Vulture and I called him, I said, “What are you doing with Hot Pod?” and he was like, “I don’t know.” And I was like, “We’ll buy it from you, you’re working here anyway, you can tell us if we’re screwing it up.” Ariel Shapiro is now the writer of Hot Pod, it’s for the podcast industry, it is effectively a trade newsletter for that industry. It’s about to have Hot Pod Summit in LA so it’s a little tiny trade business, but we think the podcast industry is very much a Verge thing to cover. So it’s this little indie culture world that the big platform companies are trying to eat and they actually haven’t really been that successful at it, it has been resisted, which is super fascinating. But we think there’s other little pockets of trade coverage that we can do, or other little pockets of important audience that will actually pay us for coverage. Over time we’ll light up a few more of those and that’s the beginnings of a subscription strategy, I really don’t think that we should paywall The Verge.

I completely agree, it does not make sense to paywall. Actually I was mistaken before, I said display fits with this sort of destination, that’s not right, what fits with destination is native advertising. And by native advertising, I mean advertising that is in the same format of what you’re surfacing. I don’t mean native advertising as a dirty word, my favorite example of native advertising is John Gruber at Daring Fireball where he just has an old school blog, a list of links to other things and then once a week, one of them is paid and it’s an advertisement. But because you’re so used to going there and reading everything, you always read that ad. The ratio of seeing the ad and reading the ad for those has to be off the charts compared to basically anything else.

I’m curious if you’re thinking about that in the context of this shift back to old school blogging and having continually updated content, because if you have people always going back and checking out this Storystream, is there an opportunity to have that be an advertising unit as well or is that something where, “Well, no. We want this to be a super pure experience. We’re not thinking about that” or is it up in the air? What’s your thinking along those lines?

NP: I showed John the new site at the Apple event and I was like, “There’s more than a little Daring Fireball in here too” and I’ve been reading John forever. Sometimes I’m jealous that he can just post to his website, and it’s hard for me because we have a huge editorial team, but that huge editorial team and that process and the fact that we hold ourselves out as journalists prevent us and I think rightfully prevent us from doing some of that native advertising that you’re talking about. I won’t write a post for an advertiser, our staff won’t, that’s just a hard wall. There’s stuff you can’t do on platforms if you want to hold yourself out as a journalist. We are never going to make a sponsored video with one of our reviewers, it’s just not going to happen, that’s just flatly against our ethics policy. So that’s fine, but I think what you are calling native advertising, I am calling branded content. So we do that and I think there’s an opportunity to invent some new — once you have a newsfeed, you can just piggyback on all of the innovation and newsfeed advertising that has occurred and you can build some formats that can actually capture the value the other newsfeed providers do. Have we done that? No.

I definitely mean native advertising from the consumer experience perspective, where it’s in the same place as the other stuff in the same format, regardless of who writes it. But I am glad you brought up the ethics angle, that’s actually something I wanted to ask you about. You’ve talked about, “Should journalists know their metrics”? That’s been one angle. You’ve talked about, you’re no longer going to do off-the-record comments, you’re going to say who the spokesperson is. At the same time, you also have affiliate marketing, which I want to ask you about. You talked about the display advertising bit and I would imagine your core advertisers are basically the same as the companies that you write about. So walk me through your thought process. How has it changed? How has it evolved? Do you feel good about where it’s at? Are there more changes that need to be made?

NP: We’ve always been pretty ferocious about being journalists in our ethics policy, so that hasn’t really changed. I think one of the things that I’m most proud of is on The Vergecast, we are always talking about streaming or broadband and we are constantly disclosing that Comcast is an investor in Vox Media. Now the company makes all kinds of TV shows and we joke that we have this mile long disclosure of, “We made a Netflix show,” and all this other stuff. When we have live events and we do the show live, the audience says the disclosure to us. It comes up and I’m like, “I have to disclose…” And the audience will be like, “…Comcast is…”

I’m always like some journalism professor or student should be writing a PhD thesis about this moment, that our transparency is now a meme with the audience, and the point of it to me is all we can do is build trust. That’s the only asset a newsroom has or a journalistic organization has and we just have to protect it. I think we’ve done a reasonably good job of earning that trust over time and we have to be good stewards of it and we have to be transparent about how we make the work that we make and that’s how you continue to do it.

So there’s stuff we won’t do. We won’t make a bunch of the money that other people make on YouTube because we just won’t let our reviewers make sponsored videos. But stuff like affiliate marketing, we feel like there’s just enough distance there, where the links are auto-generated, Vox Media has a really great commerce team that is working on that side of the business. Our team has the disclosures right at the top of the page and all that stuff and so it just feels like we can tell people about great products and review products and if you happen to click a link and buy one, some other team has made sure there’s money there, there’s enough distance there where we think the audience is 1) familiar with that behavior and 2) aware that we’re not going to recommend them bad products just because we want to make a buck. My joke is we can’t be the Sharper Image catalog.

I actually like the PhD thesis angle, because I do think this has been a real fundamental shift in thinking about trust. It used to be, “We have this clear wall between advertising and editorial”. None of these are necessarily new issues, but there is a degree to which I think all this stuff is more intermingled — I think the affiliate marketing is a great example — than it was before.

But my view on the matter is I’m completely with you, transparency is the answer here. It’s not like there weren’t biases previously, but also, I would rather have an independent publication that maybe does have funding from Comcast, maybe there are affiliate links, but at least I know those exist rather than having no independent, successful organizations at all. From my perspective, hearing that The Verge is making a whole bunch of money is actually a great thing from my perspective, because the more money you make, the less desperate you are, the more you can be straightforward and I can trust that you’re going to say no when it makes sense to say no.

NP: Yeah, you have to get to a place of scale and success and that part’s hard. But once you’re there, and I hope after eleven years I can say we’re there and not sound too egotistical. But once you get there, actually being more forthright and more confident and more demanding about your standards actually just pays itself back to you. We have this background policy where we want companies to be on the record with us when they talk to us about their products or that we asked them for comment, and the reason is we were just — you can read that whole post — but we just felt like we weren’t attributing the information well enough. There was just this moment where everything was attributed to us and what we had heard instead of being on the record and it was just getting silly. It was like, “Why am I holding the burden of proof here” This is your company, it’s your statement, you should do it.

You have to have scale to be that demanding. If we were just starting, people are like, “All right. We’re just not going to talk to you.” But we are at a place where we can sometimes have to talk to us but we’re also a place where we issued the policy and we got a couple other publications to follow us, which I thought was great. The reason we did it publicly was to create cover for other publications but most importantly, more people inside the companies, the comms people, the staff, the engineers, whoever reached out to us and said, “This is great for us. You’ve actually advocated for us.”

Editorial Approach

Where do you think your position, your editorial stance relative to the tech industry has changed? You go back to Nilay in school and he’s like, “Man, government doesn’t get it, they’re behind the times, these are how things are changing.” Now, I think all of journalism, I say The Verge maybe not as much as other places, but to an extent does seem maybe a bit more oppositional to the big tech companies, or maybe more skeptical is a better way to put it. Do you think that’s a fair characterization of where you’re at editorially? Do you see this as inconsistent or just building on college-age Nilay? How has this shifted over time, particularly over the last few years?

NP: I would reframe it as not tech or government, I would reframe it as power. College age Nilay was resistant to power, which is just fundamentally true about my personality. I don’t like being told what to do and when you’re a college kid in 1999, the people who can tell you what to do are your parents, the college administrators, and to some extent the government. What tech company was I most resistant to in 1999? It was Microsoft. It was me on the Slashdot forum saying, “Microsoft is killing Linux” or whatever it was and I think that dynamic has carried its way forward.

Today there’s a handful of big companies, they have a lot of power. Our approach at The Verge is very much that we love technology, which is important. I read a lot of tech coverage from outlets where I think maybe they might hate technology, at a fundamental level they might just not like it. I love gadgets, I love reviewing the iPhone, I think it is maybe my funnest week of the year to be with my whole team reviewing the iPhone. Very few publications or people ever get to hold the most important consumer device in our lifetimes in their hands and say, “Well that’s an 8.” That’s a privilege, it’s an honor. It’s carries a burden, but it’s also incredibly fun.

Eight seemed a bit harsh. Do Apple products get graded on a curve? I know this, speaking of Gruber, this is one of his complaints that, “Hey, the MacBook is an eight and then this PC that burns your lap get a ‘Hey, it’s pretty good. It’s a nine.'”

NP: (laughing) We actually just reset our scores because scores, like everything else, had inflation, because things just get better over time. So if you’re just comparing everything to the past, by the end of it, everything in the world is a nine. So a few months ago, we reset our scores and said, “This is the new baseline” and this one’s an eight just because it’s a year away from all the pieces of it doing what they are supposed to do.

I mean, I have noted for a while that it’s still the Nilay Patel article, the iPhone review. Obviously Verge articles, they’re huge productions and your video reviews are incredible, but is this your little treat as editor-in-chief? You can hold on to the one piece?

NP: Probably.

(laughing)A little bit. A little bit.

NP: I started the thing, I want to do it. Actually I would say, and I feel like you would appreciate this, one of the reasons I host Decoder and make the Vergecast and built a whole thing that lets me write on the site, is I very strongly believe that whatever credibility I have as a leader of the organization is that I still make the product with the team, and I’m still in it and I use the software and I get frustrated when the microphones are crackly. I have the experiences my team has and I feel like if you’re going to be a creative leader, you have to create. So part of it is the iPhone, it’s when we push it it’s an opportunity for me to push the boundary of what The Verge can be. Part of it is we have a relationship with the audience that I think we need to respect and I think that review has to be great because it’s a very important review for us. We have great reviewers, Allison Johnson reviewed the iPhone 14. I just think that there’s a moment for me with that product in particular where it’s like, “How far can I push it? Can I break The Verge? I’m the only one who’s allowed to break it at this scale. Let’s see if I can do it.” So I think there’s just an element where, and I don’t think this is true of every leader, but for me, whatever credibility I have as a leader comes from the fact that I also do the work and so that is a moment for me to do the work.

Free Speech on the Internet

One broader question outside of The Verge, but I guess it does apply, you have things like comments and commenting policies and you obviously cover these topics, but to what extent has your thoughts around moderation — or what some people would say censorship — on the Internet changed over time? Do you feel that your position has shifted? I ask because people don’t know, but you are one of my most faithful correspondents on Stratechery, so we sometimes get into these debates over email. So I’ve given you the Stratechery platform where you get to —

NP:(laughing) Ben has it wrong!

I’m curious, particularly with your background and having dug into a lot of the case law around this sort of stuff, where are you at, number one? And two, has that shifted over time and why?

NP: So where I’m at right now is that I would just come back to this concept of competition. I do not think there is enough competition in social media platforms, so you focus all of your energy on the moderation policies of four companies, and then at least the United States, both parties are like, “God, this First Amendment is a little inconvenient for us.”

There’s a lot of power there, how can I grab that power for myself?

NP: Yeah and “How can the government write a content moderation policy”? Well, that’s a government speech regulation. You asked me what I’m against, is it the tech companies or the government? Well, one thing I know I’m against as a journalist is government speech regulations, so there’s just an element where I, right now, am legitimately afraid for the future of the First Amendment. I think it is in peril from both directions.

By First Amendment, you mean specifically government action, as opposed to say a culture of the First Amendment?

NP: I don’t have any idea what culture of the First Amendment means.

That’s the question. I mean, you talked about the fact that we have limited competition, there’s only a couple platforms that matter. You talked about the consistent thread in your life is being opposed to power, and if that’s the case, and the power rests in these few platforms, sure, the government’s not necessarily regulating speech, but speech is being regulated by very powerful entities. I guess, that’s the broad strokes, I mean we’re diving deep into our email threads now.

NP: No, it’s fine, I love talking about this stuff. Again, why does The Verge exist? We saw that technology would eat the culture and we needed a more expansive way to talk about that from the basis of technology. So yes, we cover phones, but we also, to your point, we cover content moderation really deeply, and there’s an inherent trade-off there. I think we do a good job of it, because we know the decision is hard. This is coming back to we like technology, my career does not exist without the open Internet, it just would never have happened. I would have never gotten a job at Macworld Magazine. I live in Chicago, it just wasn’t going to happen.

I can relate to that, for sure.

NP: I believe in these tools. If you have progressive politics, the explosion of voices on the Internet, the democratization of the culture, is fully because of technology. It’s amazing, so we should protect that. But, because there’s only four companies, we keep trying to rein them in with government action, and I think that is misguided. When you talk about the culture of the First Amendment, it’s like I don’t know what that means. What I see is everyone has given up the fight against these four companies. They should not actually be the gatekeepers, we should not impose the burden of the First Amendment on private companies. We should have more companies, so that the market is actually deciding what level of content moderation that they would like to have imposed on them. If you just abstract that out, some people buy very safe cars and some people buy stupid, dangerous cars.

But stupid, dangerous cars are so fun.

NP: They’re fun and that’s fine. For some reason you can buy a Dodge Durango with a 707 horsepower engine in it, it cannot turn, and most of them end up crashed. This is just like a thing that happens, fine, go nuts. But you have the choice to buy a Volvo too.

Here’s the question, though. Because I completely agree, there should be more competition, more sites. I think you can tie this back into The Verge’s new design, where it’s a destination you can go to outside of the big platforms, yet get access to a whole bunch of sites — as I said, this is why I loved the launch. I feel this has been such a missing opportunity for trusted sites to dramatically expand their content, again, by basically being aggregators in their own right, right? I now know if I want to get a link to whatever is current in tech, The Verge Storystream is going to be a great option, so that’s fantastic in that regard.

But then the question comes, if the answer is the open Internet, where in the stack do we want a rock solid, firm commitment to the First Amendment, right? There’s the current recent CloudFlare issues. Is it the DNS area? Is it ISP? I think one of the big debates here is about net neutrality, it’s very fascinating to look back and see there was this big concern about private companies acting against speech, and now it feels like private companies are acting against speech all the time.

NP: Yes, it’s super weird.

It’s very weird!

NP: Yeah, I was, I still am, a huge proponent of net neutrality. In the United States, there is not enough competition for Internet access, this is just a fact. I’m not going to do a whole net neutrality speech, but there’s not enough competition.

I agree with the principle of net neutrality, I didn’t like Title II. That was my nuanced position.

NP: Now it’s a mess, and California has a law, New York has a law, and some other places now have a law, and it’s weird, and we should probably have some sort of federal law. The law should be that all the bits are equal at the physical infrastructure level, that is the law, because if T-Mobile starts throttling a website it doesn’t like, Americans have no recourse. You can’t go anywhere else.

But what is crazy about the American political environment is Democrats are pushing that version of the law, and Republicans are like, “No.” Ted Cruz famously said, “Net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet,” whatever that means. Why do we think that it’s appropriate to let the telecom companies throttle and then you move up to Twitter and Republicans are like, “We need to write a law in the state of Florida that literally imposes speech regulations on Twitter”. There’s a massive conceptual disconnect there, because it turns out that Twitter is small and if you’re mad at it, there are like five alternatives. They just don’t have the user base, but they’re still there.

We’re just lost in the weeds of, I think, having given up. There’s a nihilism to the speech conversation on the Internet that presumes these companies will exist forever, and always be in charge of you. I don’t think anything about the tech industry suggests that that is the case.

Yeah, I think we can come to, on this podcast, we can shake hands, because I do think that, in retrospect, particularly given how things have shifted, and it’s been very surprising to me, I thought things would cool down post-Trump, and it feels like they accelerated, which was a real wake-up call. Even if Title II is bad, I think it would be better than nothing, so I think that I’ve come around to you on that point.

To this point about having alternatives, I agree with you on the nihilism point. I get feedback about this, and I talk about zero distribution costs, and people are like, “No, it costs so much. You have to pay Facebook and Google.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s a customer acquisition question, which is a completely different question than distribution,” and I think there’s a degree to which the openness of the Internet has kind of become underrated. It still exists, and people are like, “Oh, that’s fine for you.” I’m like, “No, actually, there’s all kinds of people that are going direct to consumers.” The Verge, I feel like you’re over on my side of the column, in many respects, because you’re back on the “You’re going to come to this site, because you trust it” and it’s going to come here.

Platforms and AI

I’m with you, I’m not a nihilist, I’m an optimist, and I feel like this takes this conversation full circle, your 2016 redesign was almost a bit nihilistic, it was like, “Well, we have to be on the platforms. We’re going to package our stuff, we’re going to put it out there.” And now it’s like, “Now we’re planting our flag. You come to us or you don’t get the good stuff.”

NP: Look, the reality of everyone’s traffic, maybe not your traffic, but if you’re a big publisher, the reality of your traffic is that Facebook, and Snapchat, and Twitter are not driving you, they’re not doing numbers. It’s all Google, right? Google Search and Google News are driving most traffic to most publishers, and we’re going to care about search. I think that’s a healthy thing to care about — if people are searching for iPhone reviews, we think we have a good one, and there’s at least cause and effect there, that we can understand. Yes, Google’s in the middle and Google’s self-interested, but the basics of it are pure. Somebody wants something, and we have a good version of that thing, and we’re going to give it to them. The Facebook algorithm is like a black box. Like, who knows? I always imagine Mark Zuckerberg just having a dial in his office marked “Kittens,” and he would just turn it.

Is this a big change? You said Facebook doesn’t drive you much traffic. Is that a big shift from before?

NP: Well, I’ll start at the beginning again. When we first started, we had a deal with Yahoo, this is a true story. In 2011, we launched The Verge. We had a deal with Yahoo, and Yahoo would just send us floods of traffic, and we could never figure out why. I am very opposed to doing too much metrics in the newsroom. I think it distorts — The Verge is about the future, data can only tell you about the past, so if we were to only do what the data says is good, I would only review the iPhone every day for the rest of my life. It would just narrow us completely.

But then you’d get to say, “Look, who drives the most traffic on this site? Nilay Patel does.”

NP: Right, it’s just me. Every day, I review the iPhone.

So I think for a site about the future especially, we need to have a much wider aperture, so we need to have a healthy relationship with data. But then like why is Yahoo sending us all this traffic? So we start tracking it, and it turns out the Yahoo algorithm just loves stories about fish. You’re from Wisconsin, so you will definitely appreciate this. On very slow Fridays, we would just Google fish technology, and we would just write a story about fish cannons that repopulate salmon, and I’d be like, “Yeah, it’s Fish Friday.” The Wisconsin in me would just fully commit.

Friday Fish Fry, yes! I was wondering what the Wisconsin angle was, but yeah, exactly.

NP: It’s like it’s Wisconsin. It was funny, right? There was only twelve of us, or fifteen of us, or whatever. It was funny to a small team that we were like gaming this algorithm, it was like this in-joke we had, and we got a ton of Yahoo traffic. But eventually Yahoo went away and eventually The Verge got bigger and if you’re not in control with that relationship to platform traffic, and if you have a large newsroom, you will just chase it, because it’s the number that everybody can make go up. Business Insider still has Cheese Insider, which is a pure play Facebook Video traffic gambit. I respect Insider, I think Henry Blodget is a genius for being like, “Screw it, Cheese Insider. We’ve hired 30 cheese journalists. We’re going to collect every dollar Facebook will ever…” Those are moves that people can make. They’re just not for me, so I have always tried really hard to insulate us from those dynamics. Facebook for us was a big traffic source, and then it wasn’t, and we just stayed insulated from it in a way that I think a lot of other publishers got destroyed.

So it was never as big of a driver as it might have been. That makes sense. I mean, Cheese Insider is definitely taking this full circle back to Wisconsin, I cannot believe I didn’t know this exist.

NP: And it’s great!

I wrote a little bit about the AI stuff this week, and this is kind of interesting to talk to you in the context of The Verge having a super large staff. In 2016, when you redesigned the site, one of the changes you talked about was, “Oh, we used to use a lot of bad stock photos, so we actually kind of had a design that obscured the photos,” and now you’re like, “We have lots of photographers and designers on staff, so we can make our own stuff. We want to highlight that.”

I’m curious how you’re thinking about this new AI content generation world, if at all. Is that something that provokes anxiety amongst your staff? From my perspective, as a very small operation, this possibility is pretty incredible. But you’re coming at it from a totally different perspective, so toss me one last little bit about this. I’m curious what your take is.

NP: Do you remember when, it was Yahoo or somebody, started doing earnings coverage with AI?

Yeah, and it was terrible, but yes, I did remember that.

NP: A lot of them still do it, and there’s an element of, “We got to make another Twitter logo, should I have my very smart designer spend their time making a Twitter logo stock?” And we do, we have a lot of cool stock. They’re excited about it. The point of software is to make you more productive. That’s actually, literally before this call, I was at our little launch happy hour with our product team, and that’s what they built us. They built us software that makes our newsroom more productive. It might change our relationship with our audience too, but it’s going to make our newsroom more productive. So you know, there’s anxiety, sure. We have artists and designers, we have an award-winning art and illustration team, I’m very proud of them — maybe the best asset The Verge has, alongside our video team. Being able to make visual journalism right now, on the Internet, is like the most exciting thing you can do. But if those tools can help them, or if it can help our reporters do more on their own, and we can take that time back to level up, I think that is probably net a good thing. It doesn’t make great work. So like, you’re in that early part of the disruption cycle, where it’s like, “Oh, this is cheap. It’s not very good, but it’s cheap.”

Yup, it looks terrible.

NP: Yeah.

*Yeah, I actually think this fits into your site redesign, honestly, because there’s a degree where the more content there is, particularly if you don’t know where it’s coming from, the provenance of it, the more value there is in being trusted. And this all seems like a bet on, “Come to us, trust us, and we’re going to reward you.”

Thank you so much for talking, I think the site’s super interesting, it was great to talk to you, and we should do it again sometime.

NP: Ben, I’m a huge fan. Thanks for having me on.

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