Origins Between March and April 2011, up to nine of
Engadgets writers, editors, and product developers, including
editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky, left
AOL, the company behind that website, to start a new gadget site. The other departing editors included managing editor
Nilay Patel and staffers Paul Miller, Ross Miller, Joanna Stern, Chris Ziegler, as well as product developers Justin Glow and Dan Chilton. In early April 2011, Topolsky announced that their unnamed new site would be produced in partnership with sports news website
SB Nation, debuting some time in the fall. Topolsky lauded
SB Nation similar interest in the future of publishing, including what he described as their beliefs in independent journalism and in-house development of their own content delivery tools. Other news outlets viewed the partnership as positive for both
SB Nation and Topolsky's staff, and negative for AOL's outlook. Bankoff,
chairman and
CEO of
Vox Media (owner of
SB Nation), said in a 2011 interview that though the company had started out with a focus on sports, other categories including consumer technology had growth potential for the company. Development of Vox Media's
content management system (CMS), Chorus, was led by Trei Brundrett, who later became the
chief operating officer for the company.
This Is My Next Following news of his untitled partnership with
SB Nation in April 2011, Topolsky announced that the
Engadget podcast hosted by Patel, Paul Miller, and himself would continue at an interim site called
This Is My Next. By August 2011, the site had reached 1 million unique visitors and 3.4 million page views. The site closed upon
The Verges launch on November 1, 2011. On June 11, 2014,
The Verge launched a new section called "This Is My Next", edited by former editor David Pierce, as a buyer's guide for consumer electronics. By 2022, this section had been retitled simply "Buying Guide".
Launch The Verge launched November 1, 2011, At the time of Topolsky's departure,
Engadget had 14 million unique visitors. In 2013,
The Verge launched a new science section,
Verge Science, with former
Wired editor
Katie Drummond leading the effort. Patel replaced Topolsky as editor-in-chief in mid-2014. Journalist
Walt Mossberg joined
The Verge editing team after Vox Media acquired
Recode in 2015. Its logo featured a modified
Penrose triangle, an
impossible object. On November 1,
The Verge launched version 3.0 of its news platform, offering a redesigned website along with the new logo. In September 2016,
The Verge fired deputy editor Chris Ziegler after it learned that he had been working for
Apple since July. Helen Havlak was promoted to editorial director in mid-2017. In 2017,
The Verge launched "Guidebook" to host technology product reviews. In May 2018,
Verge Science launched a
YouTube channel, which had more than 638,000 subscribers and 30 million views by January 2019. The channel received more than 5.3 million views in November 2018 alone. As of August 2023, the channel has over 100 million views and 1.15 million subscribers. In March 2022, Dieter Bohn announced his resignation from The Verge in his position of Executive Editor, and that he would be moving to a new position at
Google.
The Verge rebranded and redesigned its website in September 2022 with a sharper, more simplistic logo, more colorful visual design, and new typefaces. Its new home page format resembled a news feed, incorporating external conversations from social media and reporting from other publications. The new format will, in part, reduce aggregation reporting. In December 2024,
The Verge began to
paywall some content behind a subscription service; this offering covers "premium" reports, newsletters, and reviews, as well as fewer advertisements and other features. In a blog post, Patel announced the initial subscription rate as $7 per month or $50 per year. Patel also writes in the post that the reason for moving to a subscription model was for the site to survive an
increasingly difficult market for "the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do." == Content ==