A week ago, The Verge launched a subscription. And you had questions! So we have answers. The Verge’s Helen Havlak and Nilay Patel join the show to talk about how we priced the subscription, why ad-free podcasts are hard to do, Apple News, what we do during ad breaks, and much more.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the Verge cast the flagship podcast of inside baseball
00:00:03I'm your friend David Pierce and I am outside for the first time in kind of an alarmingly long time
00:00:08I was sick most of last week plus it's just like gray and dreary and cold and just gross outside
00:00:14So I've mostly spent the last week just kind of lying on the couch feeling bad for myself and watching shows
00:00:19I've seen 50 times before which no complaints. It's a terrific way to spend your life
00:00:24But I just needed to get outside. So we're just out for a walk, by the way
00:00:27I've gotten some questions from people over the last couple of weeks who are like David. What are you doing during these intros?
00:00:33Are you actually doing these things or are you like lying to us? And the answer is I'm always doing these things
00:00:39I've done these intros from a train. I've done these intros from a paint shop. I've done them while putting together Legos
00:00:46I did one at one point like in a courthouse
00:00:51And I don't think I was supposed to do that. I don't think I got in trouble, but
00:00:54Probably not a good idea
00:00:56But I'm here for you. The other question I've gotten a bunch is David. Why do you start the show this way?
00:01:00Nobody cares just get to the tech news and to that I say that is terrific feedback and a perfectly fair point
00:01:06It's also probably not gonna change. So I'm real sorry about that
00:01:09Questions like that by the way are all we're gonna do on this show today
00:01:13We've gotten a lot of questions over the last week
00:01:15especially since we launched our subscription last week about the verge and about the verge cast and about ads and about how the media works
00:01:22And about how podcasts work and so we figured we just answer as many of them as we can all in one place
00:01:28We're gonna talk to Helen Havlak our publisher and Nilay Patel my co-host your friend my boss
00:01:33About all of this stuff the business the editorial how we think about what we make and who we make it for and how we charge
00:01:40For it all this stuff. I think this stuff really matters
00:01:43It's gonna get really wonky and detailed at some points
00:01:45And if you're not interested in like deep thoughts on the future of media, there might be spots here that aren't for you
00:01:51But I think this stuff really matters and it's a story about the internet and about what it means to try and make it work
00:01:57We're going through a lot of this stuff, but we're far from the only ones going through it
00:02:00So I think talking through what it looks like and how we're navigating it might actually be interesting
00:02:05We're gonna find out all that is coming up in just a second. But first
00:02:08I'm not done on this walk. It feels good to be outside. I forgot how good it feels to be outside
00:02:13So we're gonna keep doing it then we'll get to it. This is the verge cast. See you in a sec
00:02:17Welcome back. All right, fun fact. It started raining
00:02:20I don't know 45 seconds after I turned off the camera for that intro. So I went inside. It's better here
00:02:28I was wrong. Don't listen to me about going outside inside is where it's at
00:02:32All right. We have a lot of questions to do. Let's just get into it
00:02:35We're gonna do this in two chunks first
00:02:37We're gonna talk to Helen Havlak about some of the more sort of explicitly
00:02:41Things about the verge and the verge cast
00:02:44I think as you've heard us talk a lot about on this show
00:02:47We try really hard to keep those two things as far apart as possible
00:02:51So Helen is gonna talk to us about
00:02:53As much of the money as we possibly can then Neal I is gonna come on and we're gonna talk
00:02:58I would say more broadly about how we make the show and how we make the verge and how we think about
00:03:03All of this stuff. There's gonna be some overlaps
00:03:05I suspect between these two segments because Neal I and Helen are both
00:03:08Tasked with thinking kind of big picture about the verge at all times
00:03:13But it felt useful to pull these two things apart. So first we're gonna talk to Helen
00:03:18We got some questions including the number one by a mile
00:03:21Question that you all had about the verge and the verge cast for this meta show. So let's just dive into it
00:03:27Helen Havlak, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much excited to be here. It's been a minute. I feel like you're
00:03:32You're allowed to invite yourself on and you're allowed to talk about the verge cast
00:03:36You're allowed to invite yourself on anytime
00:03:39So I assume the fact that it's been a while just means that you don't want to be here ever
00:03:43And I have dragged you here against your will
00:03:44I'm, just an invisible presence behind the verge that's been here for 10 years and is in everyone's dms
00:03:50But rarely appears in public is it 10 years now?
00:03:53It was 10 years in november david my my helen origin story is that you and I ran ces together
00:03:59One year right after you joined and right before I left and so we had this like insane
00:04:06Crucible of a ces and then parted ways for a long time
00:04:10And now we get to work together again. We spent a lot of time in that ces trailer
00:04:14Uh where I learned that david is really good at writing headlines
00:04:19And ces from a verge perspective
00:04:22Is exhausting but fun some some things don't change it turns out
00:04:26Um, all right
00:04:27So before we get into some of the questions we got from folks
00:04:30Let's just let's just set up kind of who you are and what we're doing here. So you're the verges publisher
00:04:35Uh, what does that mean?
00:04:36That means first and foremost for this show. I am nila's boss
00:04:39That's very important
00:04:40But what that really means is I am the layer of the company vox media our parent company in between editorial the newsroom
00:04:48And the business side
00:04:50So my job is to oversee the newsroom and kind of buffer it from the business things when we talk about the firewall
00:04:56Between editorial and business. Hi, i'm helen. I'm a firewall
00:05:00I'm the firewall
00:05:02That's really um, and so I spend a lot of time
00:05:05Um making sure that the verge is making enough money to support our journalism
00:05:11Um, I spend a lot of time working on management problems
00:05:14Um strategy problems. I spend a lot of time on the phone with nilai
00:05:19But yes, I I think for you know, all intensive purposes. My most important job is the firewall between the business and the verge
00:05:28Such that we keep it running and keep everyone employed while also doing great work
00:05:32Yeah, I feel like I always think of you as the person whose job is to be
00:05:36Simultaneously the most high level and the most in the weeds of anyone at the verge
00:05:41Yes, one way I sometimes explain my job to people is I spend 30 of my time just on straight up management headaches
00:05:48I spend 30 of my time on what are our biggest businesses that we need to take care of?
00:05:54Um that has historically been advertising. So I spend a bunch of time going to client meetings
00:05:59events, um
00:06:00All of those fun things and I spend 30 of my time working on new businesses
00:06:04Where do I think the verge needs to be in the future?
00:06:07And the biggest one of those this year has been subscriptions, which I know we're going to talk about later
00:06:11yeah, so to that point actually, uh, one of the questions we've gotten a bit of is
00:06:16Both why this like why do a subscription to the website, but I would say more
00:06:21Significantly the question seems to be why now?
00:06:25As opposed to you know, people have been doing this for forever. There are lots of folks who haven't why was this the time?
00:06:30Um, well take those questions maybe separately the why subscriptions and why now
00:06:35um, why subscriptions I think anyone who listens to the verge cast has heard nilai and you david talk about
00:06:42Google zero and some of the forces that are shaping the internet in the future
00:06:46Um, there have been a lot of pressures on media businesses over the years. The verge is a big advertising business
00:06:53Um, but when you look at how does a big digital?
00:06:57advertising business work today
00:06:59Things that are pressure on that business model
00:07:02a lot of ad technology is
00:07:04Made and sold by companies like facebook and google. They own an outsized portion of the total digital media advertising pie
00:07:12Fox media has insulated ourselves from that a bit by also having our own ad tech stack called concert
00:07:17Which I don't think we talk enough about
00:07:19Um, but that's definitely one pressure. Another is the pressure of distribution on our scale
00:07:25So advertising you make a lot of money in advertising if you can charge high rates for it
00:07:30Because the product you make is really good
00:07:32Um, or maybe you're not sharing a cut of that with someone else
00:07:35You make money because you're reaching a lot of people and that's where distribution has really changed since you know
00:07:422016 facebook was sending a fire hose of traffic to everyone
00:07:47Google has been sending fire hoses of traffic to every publisher in the world and with the rise of generative search
00:07:54That's changing search is changing a lot. And so
00:07:58You know at nilai and I have been talking for a long time about how do we prepare the verge for a point where?
00:08:03We're not getting a ton of traffic from other people's platforms
00:08:07And so we need our own audience. That was the whole premise of our redesigned website in 2022
00:08:13And so the kind of next extension of that how do you insulate the business model?
00:08:18from some of these big forces
00:08:21Well, it's subscription what drives a really good subscriptions business it's really good content that reaches a lot of loyal people
00:08:28And so it was kind of the obvious
00:08:30Next place to go that being said we've been
00:08:33Really cautious I would say and how we've approached it to try and keep a big free product
00:08:39Of the verge going at the same time a lot of people use the verge as a daily news utility
00:08:44If we don't want to be so dependent on other people's distribution
00:08:48I think we need to tend to that daily habit make sure we do a good job there
00:08:52But you know, I think the challenges of running an internet content business are huge. They're only getting harder and
00:09:00worse, I think the
00:09:02Place we need to be to insulate ourselves from all that change is to have a healthy subscriptions business
00:09:08And then why now, you know the best time to launch. What is the cliche saying the best time to plant a tree is
00:09:1410 years ago. The next best time is tomorrow, right?
00:09:17Same with subscriptions the best time to launch a subscription business is 10 years ago. The next best time is tomorrow
00:09:23fair enough, do you think
00:09:25the ultimate goal here is to
00:09:28Kind of be all of those things at the same time like we we talk about, you know
00:09:32there's the there's an advertising business and there's a subscriptions business and there's having a huge audience and there's having a dedicated audience and
00:09:38I feel like a lot of what we've seen in media over the last few years is people
00:09:42Betting on one or the other and very rarely all of the above. Do you think it's possible to bet on all of the above?
00:09:49When you say all of the above the the thing I would maybe clarify is I think where people got into trouble as media businesses
00:09:56Was betting on total traffic and total page use
00:10:00and what has become really clear as
00:10:04x has
00:10:05Stopped sending meaningful traffic as zuckerberg has gotten less interested in news
00:10:10um is that
00:10:12True audience is different from a bunch of page views. Yes
00:10:17And so when we're thinking about what do we need to invest in it's true audience who comes to us directly
00:10:24Things we know about those people right like you could look at the total verge page views
00:10:30But the people who are true verge audience
00:10:33Those people on average do a lot of page views for us
00:10:37That's where a lot of our meaningful audience comes from
00:10:40and so if I were to say
00:10:41What we need is a large loyal audience of real people who truly care about and form habit around the verge
00:10:49And that is the single biggest asset
00:10:52And on that asset
00:10:54You can support several kinds of businesses. You can support an advertising business. You can support a subscriptions business
00:11:00You can support a commerce business
00:11:02but the true currency
00:11:04That I think any media brand needs in order to survive the next 13 years
00:11:10Is a direct loyal audience who actually has affinity and builds habit around your brand
00:11:16Yeah
00:11:17yeah, I remember my my old boss at wired nick thompson always used to say when when they were doing the paywall over there that
00:11:22uh
00:11:23the beauty of this system is it just
00:11:25Aligns us better with the people who read our stuff
00:11:29He's like that's just we're going to do lots of other things
00:11:31But this idea that we are now pulling in the same direction as the people who come to our website every day
00:11:36Feels pretty good. Yeah, you know, I think there's the part of a subscription business. That's just business, right?
00:11:41This is another revenue line for us
00:11:44but one thing i'm really excited about is
00:11:46Okay, if we're gonna build loyalty and habit what we really need people to do is come directly to the verge log into the verge
00:11:54Spend a bunch of time on the verge. Maybe become a commenter
00:11:58Interact with our people and getting people to subscribe
00:12:01And pay for something actually ends up deepening their relationship
00:12:06And it makes us I think more directly accountable to our audience
00:12:09I think we have always felt directly accountable to our audience
00:12:12But in a way like you all listeners of verge cast who might now be verge subscribers
00:12:17You are our clients. We have a job we have to do for you. We have standards we have to meet
00:12:22and I think
00:12:24It aligns editorial and business incentives in a really great way. I wouldn't say that's that advertising is opposite
00:12:31You know, I think advertising rewards good journalism
00:12:34um if you're trying to do
00:12:37you know like a good direct advertising business, but
00:12:41I am excited for the the way this will change our relationship to our audience
00:12:45Totally. Well with that in mind
00:12:47Let me give you three questions that our audience has been asking us that I think you're the you're the best person to answer
00:12:51uh, the first one is
00:12:54I would say by by several orders of magnitude the most
00:12:58Asked question over the last two weeks. Uh
00:13:02Both before and after we announced the subscription, which I got a kick out of uh, and it is it is ad-free
00:13:08Podcasts in general and ad-free verge cast in particular that is not part of the subscription
00:13:13uh
00:13:14Where is where is your mind and and the verge's mind on?
00:13:18ad-free podcasts
00:13:20Hello verge cast listeners. I know you all want ad-free podcasting
00:13:24Um, I think look first david. I want to set some context about media
00:13:29It is a bloodbath out there right now. Like our competitors are cutting jobs
00:13:33Newsrooms are moving away from reporting on news journalism jobs keep going away
00:13:38and so success for the verge and our subscription product is not that we are like
00:13:45Making a bunch of media executives super rich and buying super cars
00:13:49Success is like we get to continue to exist and if we're super successful
00:13:54Maybe we get to give a few more journalist jobs next year and have their work here on the verge cast. Um, so
00:14:01It's this is not like a big
00:14:03Remarkable profit engine the media business famously wildly profitable. You're not buying several fancy new cars as a result
00:14:11No, i'm so sorry. Neely. I won't be buying you a new truck
00:14:15um
00:14:16so if the verge does really well next year what that looks like is we get to give a few more journalist jobs and
00:14:21We get to continue to exist
00:14:23um, so I want to set that context of like
00:14:27What we're trying to do here is continue to exist make more things make better things
00:14:31um, but you know, there's a reason pr people outnumber journalists six to one in this country right now it's because
00:14:37Virtually every journalist could leave the industry and make more money elsewhere a big place
00:14:41The verge has lost reporters who is actually google. We love you Dieter
00:14:45um
00:14:46But we don't leave like we all care about the work. We really like working with our colleagues
00:14:49It's kind of earnest and corny. Sorry david, but that's why we keep doing this
00:14:54I know we try to avoid saying that out loud, but it is true without that way
00:14:57I've talked a little bit about why subscriptions and why now?
00:15:00Um in the subscription product on the website
00:15:03We did a premium ad experience and we did it instead of an ad free experience and i'll kind of explain why
00:15:09The verge makes most of our money in advertising today
00:15:12We are not in a situation where the verge is in such trouble
00:15:15We need to make a hard pivot because there's no advertising left and the only thing that will save us is subscription revenue
00:15:21We still have a pretty good ad business and we need to take care of that thing because it's going to be paying our bills
00:15:26For the next several years subscriptions are a really long game
00:15:30And so as we build this thing, we cannot afford to mess up our advertising business or the verge will be in bad trouble
00:15:36So as we were looking though at what do people want from the verge website? Well, they wanted fewer ads they wanted better ads
00:15:42They definitely didn't want the chum boxes
00:15:44And so we said okay if we can't do ad free because we need to take care of our ad business
00:15:48And what people are really talking about is they don't want us to interrupt their reading experience so much
00:15:53They don't want some of the like video ads. They don't want the outbraid chum boxes. We can make that happen, right? So
00:15:59We did a premium ad experience and then benefits of that to the ad side are
00:16:05You know those chum boxes and some of those other ad units those are served by third parties
00:16:10And so any ads sold there aren't sold directly by vox media and so someone else is taking a cut
00:16:15So when I got rid of those in our subscription
00:16:17What I can also do is say to our advertisers if you want to reach the premium verge audience who?
00:16:22Subscribes and pays for us
00:16:23The only way to do that is to buy your ads directly from vox media
00:16:26And I love that because then I don't have to give a cut of any revenue to anyone else
00:16:30And that helps me insulate my business
00:16:33I mentioned earlier vox media makes their own ad tech. It's like a weird part of the business, but it's an important thing of like
00:16:39Now I can serve my own ads. I don't give anyone else a cut
00:16:41and so the end result of the premium ad experience on the website is
00:16:46We tend to the ad business. We maybe actually give us a really powerful good tool
00:16:51to do better in the ads business and we do
00:16:55Service for our audience to streamline the page. Maybe make more people read maybe make people have a better experience
00:17:00So they read more pages and that it all kind of works. So that's the website
00:17:05we did not include podcasts at launch in part because
00:17:09We're just trying to launch the best time to launch a subscription is 10 years ago. So we're just trying to get out there
00:17:13Yeah, um, but there's two barriers that make podcast advertising
00:17:18A little bit harder for us to figure out one is technical and one is business
00:17:22So i'll talk about those separately on the technical front
00:17:26We don't control any of the platforms where people are listening to podcasts
00:17:29I doubt many of you verge casters are like clicking a megaphone embed on our website
00:17:34You are we left. Um, I bet you are listening to the show on youtube
00:17:37In apple podcast and spotify, um in wherever you get your podcast, right?
00:17:42So we don't control that which means it's a little hard to have
00:17:47an ad-free podcast feed
00:17:49Because we're not in control of the platform
00:17:51So the way most people do it today is they have their main feed which contains ads
00:17:55And then they create a separate feed
00:17:58That is the ad-free feed that they give to subscribers
00:18:01That does take people off the main feed which reduces their total numbers there
00:18:07And then if the distribution platform does anything algorithmically in terms of recommendations
00:18:12You've taken a bunch of audience out of your main feed
00:18:15But you've also taken like the most engaged audience out of that feed so that can be a little bit risky, right?
00:18:20You know apple has now offering apple podcast subscriptions, but that is in their platform. They own the customer relationships. They own the credit cards
00:18:29That's not good for our business. And so there's a technical barrier
00:18:33It can be overcome, but that's just one thing that we're thinking about that is both like the beautiful and complicated thing about
00:18:40Podcasts is that there just is no one who can wrap their arms around the whole thing
00:18:45Yeah, so it's kind of a hacky solution
00:18:46Yeah, you make a you make a separate feed and you give it to a bunch of people and if they unsubscribe I think
00:18:52It's not really easy to cut them off from that feed. But like all of this is like solvable, right?
00:18:57It's not ideal, but it's solvable
00:18:59You can come up with solutions plenty of people have come up with solutions to do this
00:19:03I would say the bigger issue for us is the business issue
00:19:06So when we were launching and we were figuring out what to charge for a verge subscription
00:19:10We wanted to keep the price point pretty low so that it was accessible to as many people as possible
00:19:15For the people who make the verge part of their daily utility and we did not want to come in super high on pricing
00:19:21And both alienate our core verge people but also like limit the number of people we could
00:19:27You know entice into a subscription
00:19:29The thing is podcast ads are currently worth more than website ads
00:19:33I think for those of you who are listening to this podcast you have david and nilai in your ears
00:19:38It is a more
00:19:40Engaging ad format than a banner ad even the most engaging banner ad I would say
00:19:46My guess is podcast advertising is by and large outperforming some other forms of advertising
00:19:51Which means it's very expensive
00:19:54And advertisers happen to love the verge cast as you have seen advertisers are even buying the lightning round on the verge cast
00:20:00We will never understand why but we are grateful that they do it
00:20:04So for us to take ads out of the verge cast for again the most engaged people
00:20:10That would cost us a lot of money and it would cost us more money than we are charging for a subscription
00:20:15So then we have kind of two possibilities
00:20:18One is to say
00:20:20Okay, is there some kind of ad light experience similar to what we're doing on the website?
00:20:24Like what is fewer ads that's few enough that you verge cast people would not be still furiously angry that there are ads
00:20:32Is it one pre-roll? Like what does that look like?
00:20:36I think that's one avenue to explore
00:20:38Um, the other is to say okay
00:20:40Maybe there's a price or a separate tier of verge subscription
00:20:44Such that we could take all ads out of the verge cast without killing our business. I think both of those are things
00:20:50We will be exploring. I know people want it
00:20:53I would like to be able to give it to people and I think we'll be able to figure it out
00:20:57But those are just the business realities of podcasting ads and why it's a little harder for us to lose those
00:21:04Because again while I would like everyone here to maybe
00:21:07Dream that a ton of people are getting wildly rich off digital media. It is just not the case
00:21:13Yeah, and so what we are trying to do here is continue to exist
00:21:17Hire a few more journalists
00:21:19Yeah. Yeah, the goal is to be able to keep making the verge cast like that's that's fundamentally what we're here to do
00:21:24um
00:21:25That's that's a good answer and I will say just to everyone who has written in it's it's this
00:21:30And it's chapters on the podcast and I promise you we hear you and we we we are we are thinking about both all the time
00:21:37uh, and and again
00:21:38Thank you to everybody who writes in and tells us their feelings because you all have a lot of them
00:21:42And I very much enjoy it. All right, two more
00:21:44Uh simpler questions and then i'm gonna let you get out of here
00:21:48question number one is uh, we got a bunch of questions about apple news both in terms of like
00:21:54Should I read the website if I want to?
00:21:56Support at the verge is should I read and subscribe there or should I read it in apple news plus now that it's in apple
00:22:02news plus
00:22:02uh
00:22:03And just a bunch of people trying to figure out the sort of content mix
00:22:06We used to have a lot of stuff in apple news now. We're in apple news plus
00:22:10What how does that factor into kind of the broader subscription thinking here?
00:22:14Um, i'll say the broader subscription thinking is that now we charge for the verge. There is a verge subscription
00:22:20Which means we are giving less of the verge away for free and in particular we are giving less of the verge
00:22:26away for free on other people's platforms
00:22:29and so
00:22:30A great way to support the verge is to subscribe to the verge and use our website put a bookmark on your home page
00:22:36Read us there. That's terrific. We are also participating in apple news plus
00:22:41So going forward in apple news
00:22:43You will need to be an apple news plus subscriber in order to read the verge there
00:22:47and I know there were some people it sounds like actually
00:22:50More people than I thought who were loyal verge readers who were reading us for free in apple news
00:22:54We're really sad now. I was very surprised by how many people uh noticed us being gone from apple news. Yeah, I was actually
00:23:02Surprised not because there's not a ton of apple news users who consume their news that way
00:23:07that's totally a way people consume their news, but more of that
00:23:11within apple news
00:23:13People were like loyally following the verge specifically
00:23:17Because it is more of an algorithmic news or I guess in their case
00:23:21It's more of an editor curated news experience where it's a bunch of different publications
00:23:25So I think the surprising thing to me there is not
00:23:28um was more like they're curating so many publications that there's people who specifically care about the verge for reading us apple news, but
00:23:36the reality is
00:23:37We're now charging on our website
00:23:39I would hate to be charging people for something on our website and then giving it away for free somewhere else
00:23:44That would not feel also fair to the people who are paying us on the website
00:23:48And so for that reason I would say
00:23:51Two important ways you could support the verge would be subscribing to the verge or if you are an apple news plus subscriber
00:23:56Would like to consume your news that way subscribe to apple news plus and then read a bunch of verge content in apple
00:24:02And that also supports us and that's fine by me. Yeah, that's a that's a
00:24:06That win-win I think is actually a useful thing because a thing we hear
00:24:10Surprisingly frequently is people being like I want to support the verge
00:24:14What is the best way to do that?
00:24:15And the thing I always have told people
00:24:17Is come hang out on the website and now I feel like it's come hang out on the website and pay for the website
00:24:21But also like if you are an apple news plus person
00:24:24And want to stay that way that's fine that that works for us, too. Yeah, that supports us too. All right, that's good. All right
00:24:29uh one more
00:24:31Uh, this is a question from tim that i'm just gonna read verbatim because I thought it was really interesting and I want to know
00:24:35What you think?
00:24:36Uh tim says so you've often spoken about how adding a subscription model to something that is otherwise ad supported
00:24:42Can change how ads are sold or what the value of them is?
00:24:44It changes the demographics of the free users in a way that reduces the value of the ads and then
00:24:49Basically, like what do we do with that?
00:24:52Now that the verge has made this shift was that part of the thinking of making the shift?
00:24:56Well, definitely
00:24:57I mean, I think you just heard me explain why we did a premium ad experience instead of ad free and it was for exactly
00:25:02this reason, um
00:25:04If we were to take all of our content and make it totally ad free for verge subscribers
00:25:10That weakens your advertising business both in terms of
00:25:14Scale like how much audience is there?
00:25:18um how engaged that scale is
00:25:20and then also I think
00:25:23Advertisers perceive that someone who is paying for the verge
00:25:28Is someone who truly loves the verge truly cares about the verge and if an advertiser wants to work with the verge
00:25:34That's exactly the person they want to most reach are like super fans
00:25:39and so
00:25:40Tim is dead on that. The reason we did not do ad free
00:25:44Is because we thought it would be too damaging to our advertising business
00:25:47Which again will pay our bills for the next several years at least in which I think can happily coexist
00:25:52And so this is in the world of digital media where again like success is like journalism continues to happen
00:25:59But you're seeing the same pressure play out on like platforms like netflix, right?
00:26:04Netflix was ad free for a long time
00:26:06And has finally had to reckon with the fact that even as a subscription business
00:26:10There are cheaper subscription tiers
00:26:13They're not charging enough money to make up for the money. They would make just doing ads
00:26:18And so there is definitely a fine balance if you put too many ads and you alienate people and they don't want to consume
00:26:25Your content that's a bad experience and it's bad for the advertiser, too
00:26:29so
00:26:30I guess all of which is to say that's exactly why we're doing premium ad experience and not ad free
00:26:35Okay, fair enough. And then how did we land on the price seven dollars a month fifty dollars a year?
00:26:40Where is that? Is that number art? Is it science? Where did that come from?
00:26:43Oh, that's good. Um
00:26:45How do we land on price?
00:26:46So we wanted to be affordable enough that we thought a lot of people who subscribe to the verge could pay for us
00:26:52we did a survey last year to ask people like would we be part of your
00:26:56Kind of personal expenses or business expenses and by and large what we heard is we would be part of people's personal expenses
00:27:03We didn't therefore want to charge
00:27:05Hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year that we assumed people would be billing back to our workplace
00:27:10Right, which is like the wall street journal money. Like that's a different kind of expense. Yeah, or the information or
00:27:16Some of those competitors, right?
00:27:18I think I would assume a lot of those subscriptions are being billed back to the workplace
00:27:22What we heard is people want to subscribe to the verge because they personally love the verge
00:27:27And it's part of not just their work utility, but it's also something that brings them entertainment and joy
00:27:34and so those are the people we want to reach with our subscription people who have
00:27:39A true relationship with the verge people who make it part of their daily habit. And so we didn't want to price too high
00:27:45Um that we would not be able to reach those people. And so we did a bunch of competitive research
00:27:50we did a bunch of research on
00:27:52What it will cost us to like run this thing
00:27:55We did a bunch of research on what is turning off all the ads that we turned off cost
00:27:59And what do we need to cover there?
00:28:01Um, and so we kind of put all of that together to arrive at the price
00:28:06Um, we did decide to charge significantly less if people subscribe annually than monthly
00:28:11Um, that's because I want a long-term relationship with people our annual subscription also right now comes with this incredibly cool magazine content goblins
00:28:19That is deranged and perfect and fantastic. Yeah as a former engagement editor who did marketing and seo before you were a content goblin
00:28:28Yes, we've all done it at one point. It's okay. No, we're all still content. That's true. David
00:28:33um
00:28:34But yeah, so we we had to be expensive enough to cover our costs and make this a good business
00:28:39but I wanted to be cheap enough and nilai and
00:28:42I think everyone wanted to be cheap enough that we thought people could afford this as part of their
00:28:47Daily entertainment maybe more so than an expensive subscription. They bought through work fair enough. I like it
00:28:52I don't know. It's there's not actually like that many great places to hang out online anymore
00:28:56I don't know if like this is part of the
00:28:59Canon of ai content that hits the web or how the social platforms are working
00:29:03Like there just aren't that many fun places on the web anymore. I think the verge
00:29:07Fills that for a lot of people. I want it to fill that for a lot of people. Yeah, and so we wanted to price where
00:29:13It could be part of people's regular budget and it is very fun to just be
00:29:18Increasingly focused on making the verge.com a fun place to hang out like that in addition to all of the
00:29:25Like high-minded journalistic ideals like that's a really fun problem to try and solve
00:29:29It's just make it a fun place to be and that is like that is a real goal. We have yeah
00:29:33Yeah, that was quick posts, right? That's what we wanted to do with the new website was create a home page
00:29:38But so fun you sit there and you refresh it all day, right?
00:29:42I mean david I think you know this but I joined the verge because I was a super verge fan
00:29:46Uh in my past life when I worked in marketing for samsung
00:29:50Um, and I would refresh the verge all day at my work computer. I just loved seeing what was happening
00:29:56I loved 90 seconds on the verge
00:29:58Real throwback and we're gonna get emails about that now
00:30:00Yeah, um, and I think having that kind of energy of like a cool place to be
00:30:05Some place you want to refresh and see what's happening and like I don't know what
00:30:10Liz lopato has decided to quick post in a given day like it should be a fun place to be totally totally
00:30:16All right. Well, we gotta take a break
00:30:17But helen you you have to come back soon, uh and talk about something other than the grand business of the verge
00:30:23We have lots of stuff. It's gonna be fun. Um, as you know, david
00:30:26I am going to come back and i'm going to tell you how I use figma for garden design
00:30:31Oh wait, yes sold that was an even better pitch than I expected. We're gonna do that. All right. Helen. Thank you as always
00:30:37Bye david. Thanks for having me
00:30:39All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna talk to neely
00:30:43We'll be right back
00:30:47Support for the verge cast comes from fundraise
00:30:50Venture capital is widely seen as one of the most lucrative asset classes in the world
00:30:54Go look at the s&p 500 nearly every tech company on that list was once funded by venture capital firms
00:31:01Producing billions of dollars in profit in the process
00:31:03The hard truth. However, is that the biggest venture funds are almost entirely funded by institutional investors
00:31:09So unless you knew a guy who knew a guy you and 99.9
00:31:14Of individual investors did not get to participate in the pre-ipo growth of any of those blue chip companies
00:31:20The fundraise innovation fund is finally changing that it's a more than
00:31:25125 million dollar fund it holds some of the most exciting pre-ipo tech companies in the world
00:31:31And it's designed specifically for individual investors. You can get in early at fundraise.com
00:31:37Slash verge carefully consider the investment material before investing including objectives risks charges and expenses
00:31:43This and other information can be found in the innovations fund perspectives at fundraise.com slash innovation. This is a paid advertisement
00:31:51Support for the verge cast comes from stripe payment management software isn't something your customers think about often
00:31:57They see your product they want to buy it and then they buy it
00:32:01That's about as complex as it gets but under the hood of that process
00:32:04There's a lot of really complicated things happening that have to go right in order for that sale to go through
00:32:10Stripe handles the complexity of financial infrastructure
00:32:13Offering a seamless experience for business owners and their customers
00:32:17For example stripe can make sure that your customers see their currency and preferred payment method when they shop
00:32:23So checking out never feels like a chore
00:32:26Stripe is a payments and billing platform supporting millions of businesses around the world including companies like uber bmw and door dash
00:32:34Stripe has helped countless startups and established companies alike reach their growth goals making progress on their missions and reach more customers globally
00:32:42That platform offers a suite of specialized features and tools to power businesses of all sizes like stripe billing
00:32:49Which makes it easy to handle subscription-based charges invoicing and all reoccurring revenue management needs
00:32:55Learn how stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at stripe.com. That's stripe.com to learn more
00:33:02stripe
00:33:03make progress
00:33:05All right, we're back so there's more business stuff to talk about and I suspect we will talk about some of it
00:33:10But let's switch gears a bit and talk about
00:33:13how we make the things that we make and
00:33:16How we think about the world that we live in and who better to do that with
00:33:20Than your friend my co-host my boss
00:33:24Verge's editor-in-chief
00:33:25Nilay patel, that sounded like a wrestling intro. That was pretty fun. Uh, we have a lot of questions for nilay
00:33:30We're gonna spend a bunch of time talking about all of this stuff. So let's just dive into it nilay. Hello
00:33:35Hello, I just want you to know that helen was here before you and she called herself the firewall
00:33:41She was like hi i'm helen
00:33:42I'm the firewall and that's awesome. And that is what you have to live up to on this episode
00:33:47You need a nickname that you give yourself that is so good that I agree to it
00:33:51the fire
00:33:53The fire, there we go. All right, that's pretty good. Uh, okay, so we got we got a lot of questions. Uh,
00:33:59Around a couple of different themes. So I have tried to sort of
00:34:02Break this up thematically, but you're gonna notice it just gets more random as it goes because you just got a lot of questions
00:34:07We're gonna answer as many of them as we can. But can I just agree with you that helen is an incredibly hard act to follow
00:34:11Oh god. Yeah, there's a reason we made her our boss. We're like you shouldn't be in charge
00:34:16Yeah, it's it's very real. Um, okay
00:34:19We have what I would call like a like a gentle controversy to start with which i'm very excited about
00:34:25Uh, so let me let me i'm gonna play you a question and then i'm gonna read you an email
00:34:29And I think they're they're together
00:34:30So we're going to talk about them if this isn't about whether or not
00:34:33Theater at large of the verge should have a shitty tv in good taste. I'm gonna be very disappointed
00:34:37No, I think everyone's actually pretty
00:34:41I'm the outlier
00:34:43But that's okay i'm good at that. All right, let me just play this question for you
00:34:46Hi, this is jessica from massachusetts
00:34:49One of the things that i've always appreciated about the verge was the wall that you put between the sales department
00:34:55and the newsroom
00:34:57now that you have
00:34:59lightning round sponsorship
00:35:01And now that the team is aware of who the sponsors are
00:35:05How are you going to maintain that journalistic integrity?
00:35:09Thanks so much. Love you guys. Let's think for a year
00:35:12Okay, so we have that and I'd also like to read you an email we got from max
00:35:17My daughter not your daughter. Okay, uh, but you never know max max does have thoughts the emails. Why do I have to be quiet?
00:35:23Okay
00:35:25Max writes neely has said multiple times that he keeps a firewall between the newsroom and the ad scene and it's been said that they
00:35:30Would make money if the news people read the ads versus ad people
00:35:33Neely goes as far as to not directly say the companies that are sponsoring the lightning round
00:35:37But david does ad reads for the verge cast liam
00:35:40I know he's the producer but he does appear as a voice from time to time also does them
00:35:43What makes those reads different or acceptable? Why can david do ad reads but neely can't?
00:35:48different questions same thing
00:35:51Wait, no, I think they're different things. Are they? Yeah. Why do you think they're okay? Well then let's let's pull them apart
00:35:56Why do you think they're different things?
00:35:57So we can look at our own website and see who our advertisers are all the time. That's a very normal
00:36:03thing so knowing who the lightning round sponsors are
00:36:06to me is not any different than
00:36:08knowing
00:36:09Whatever that you know, whatever wireless carrier is buying
00:36:13ads on our site around iphone time
00:36:16It's been 13 years, I know the wireless carriers by ads on our center right from time I think you can see that
00:36:22That doesn't really affect how we cover the wireless carriers, right?
00:36:25um, so knowing who the lightning round sponsor is to me is
00:36:28That's just all of a piece, right? It's we can we can see the product that we deliver to the audience
00:36:34um
00:36:35And we just don't let that affect us like where they come they go. The rule is
00:36:40The advertising team doesn't get to tell us what to do
00:36:43and we don't get to tell them what to do right and that is very difficult like
00:36:49I there are there are ads on this show that I know people would prefer we didn't have
00:36:54But because the advertising team doesn't get to tell us what to do our ability to
00:36:58To open the door and start telling them what to do is challenging because then the doors open
00:37:04Right now we're negotiating and I don't want to have that negotiation. So that's just different to me, right?
00:37:09it's we're aware of what they're doing because we at the end that we
00:37:12We assemble the whole product and we put it out in the world
00:37:15And the lightning round is new and it's funny and it's funny that the first sponsor was a big company
00:37:20Uh, but we have ideas for that too. So I we're just going to work that out. It's it's new but I think
00:37:26That is a familiar expression of the firewall
00:37:29And the reason I was joking that i'm the fire is because the the people that yell the most
00:37:33The yelling usually goes in one direction. It's me that way
00:37:36I was gonna say I think you spend a lot of time telling sales what to do. They're just not
00:37:40Obligated to listen to you. I think it's a key difference, right?
00:37:43My job is to protect the user experience of the website, right?
00:37:46And so like you can just look around at advertising supported websites and you can see the things that we have not done
00:37:52And that is a lot of me and helen agreeing that we're not going to do those things and then i'm just the heavy
00:37:56Like I get to yell where she has to go run our business
00:38:00So that's that the so does that have I adequately separated these two things?
00:38:05yeah, no, I think that's fair and I think the the the
00:38:07Point that I was going to make about the firewalls is what you said that it actually it exists in both directions
00:38:11Which is that like they see the stuff that we make and we see the stuff that they sell
00:38:16but neither side has any idea of what's going on and like
00:38:19We didn't know I didn't know when I made the rundown for the show who was advertising in that show
00:38:25so right it's like
00:38:26Knowing who they are is I think less compromising than if we understood more of the process
00:38:31and how much money was involved and what was sold for when and to whom like
00:38:34that
00:38:36We stay away from very much on purpose
00:38:37But like you're right I can I can look at our web page and tell you who's advertising on it
00:38:41And I think by and large that's mostly fine. Yeah, and I can pull that even farther back
00:38:45We trade on a lot of old school journalism, right? We're built on a foundation that has been around for a long time
00:38:50so
00:38:51when you were printing magazines
00:38:54that
00:38:55Advertising was printed in the magazine, right? And you had to physically assemble that product and
00:39:01Decide where the ads would go if I mean I was a car and driver reader in the 90s in Wisconsin when I was a kid
00:39:07and half of the letters the editor were like
00:39:09Why are there bmw ads around the bmw review you're biased and like they would print the letters just so they could say look
00:39:14No, we're not
00:39:15Whether or not you believe them in the 90s and car and driver
00:39:17They did give a lot of good reviews to bmw back then but um, this is just like an old muscle, right?
00:39:23you have an editor-in-chief and you have a publisher and
00:39:26We helen and I have a great relationship
00:39:27But she's the business and i'm the newsroom and we're supposed to have a little bit of tension
00:39:33Yeah, and that's good. Like that's that's what we mean by the firewall
00:39:36She has to go be make us money and I have to spend the money. Great
00:39:40uh
00:39:41I didn't know you were reading the ads and i'm just going to tell you that you have to stop
00:39:45I think i've read one ad this year. Okay, uh for whatever it's worth. Um
00:39:51Yeah, okay. So we should talk about this in two ways
00:39:53Uh, one is just realistically you are my boss and you get to tell me what to do so like you you win this fight
00:39:59but uh
00:40:00I think as as a as a co-host of the verge cast
00:40:03I I do want to press on this because I think this is something I just have less religion about than you do on
00:40:08Podcast ads in particular. Yes, uh, and I just want to poke at it, right like
00:40:14the the line for me of like
00:40:16We don't make branded content right is like so so so clear and so clean and so
00:40:21Important to everything that we do right so like when when
00:40:25years ago
00:40:26like branded blog posts were like a huge business for buzzfeed and it was a thing everybody was talking about like
00:40:31The the divide between those two things was always very clear to me
00:40:35It's
00:40:36That's less problematic for me in podcasts
00:40:39Then like it's it's not quite as stark for me there
00:40:41Like you see a lot of podcast ads where one thing they really want is like personal experience, right?
00:40:46So you hear your podcast host talk about the product they got and why they like it. That's part of the ad
00:40:51The advertiser pays more money for that and we just resolutely won't do that. We just don't do it. Uh,
00:40:57and
00:40:58the
00:40:59middle ground there where it's like
00:41:02the host who is obviously reading an ad reads an ad
00:41:07is just like a
00:41:08common part of the form of podcasts and
00:41:12Frankly just makes me feel less gross than it would in some other forms and I can't totally describe why
00:41:20But that's where i'm at like I think the
00:41:23The advertiser I read an ad for is like not somebody we would ever cover
00:41:27uh, I would never do it for somebody we would ever cover
00:41:29and
00:41:31Yeah, I don't know. It felt okay and it always comes to me. It's like here's a thing to do
00:41:34I'm, like sure and I just read it and it's over. I would say one of the major challenges of uh,
00:41:39Having david working organization is david's like yeah, I will do everything
00:41:42And then you're like wait that rocket ship is gone
00:41:45And I have to relive that and that's very much the david pierce experience and I love it. I have no complaints about that. Um,
00:41:51but the I think that
00:41:54I think i've just been radicalized over the past five to ten to thirteen years of writing this place. I think that nuance is gone
00:42:01I think it is dead and I particularly think
00:42:05That the new audience the younger audience that came up in influencer world
00:42:10Does not even know that there should be a firewall does not even know that we're trading on
00:42:16hundreds of years of traditional journalism
00:42:19editor publisher dynamics
00:42:21we're going to print a magazine and the ads are going to sit next to the reviews and there's a whole
00:42:26Ecosystem and there's lots of crotchety old journalists who talk about the fights like they don't even know that existed because it's gone, right?
00:42:33We're we're we're just rebuilding the ecosystem from scratch for better or worse
00:42:38And most of the creators we compete with have decided that the
00:42:43There's not a wall
00:42:44the wall exists within themselves right and they have to
00:42:47And I think a lot of them do a good job of explaining where their lines are going to be
00:42:51Fine, our line is just very different. And I think the second we make it more complicated where we lose
00:42:58right, and so like we us saying well, you know, we have a list of approved advertisers that we'll do host reads for but
00:43:03We want to personal like in the broad ecosystem of stuff
00:43:09Like I think that message just gets lost
00:43:11Right and the idea that you can pay us to say stuff is the only message it comes through
00:43:16So that's why i've been like very
00:43:18over the years like I used to read some of the ads and I thought it was funny when we
00:43:22Restarted the end gadget podcast. We had no ads because who was gonna
00:43:27With me and josh and paul just like start like restarting this whole podcast
00:43:29It was sitting around and when we got our first ads, we were like thrilled
00:43:33Right because it was like validating and I can see a bunch of creators
00:43:38Feel the validation of oh an advertiser. The first brand deal is a moment as a writer and I i'm totally sympathetic to that
00:43:46So like i've had all the experiences. I just think now at this point when
00:43:51we are rebuilding this ecosystem from scratch for an audience that has no familiarity with it where the
00:43:57The instinct and the expectation is
00:44:00You can pay people to say things on social platforms
00:44:04I think we just have to be harsher about it
00:44:06and fundamentally what what we're selling with our subscription is like this is
00:44:10This is the thing that keeps us from having to do that to keep the lights on
00:44:13And maybe that's too harsh
00:44:15I I think I think at the end of the day like the internet destroys nuance
00:44:20And i'm i'm just i'm willing to be a little
00:44:23Harsher to preserve the clarity of our message around how the journalism is made
00:44:28than maybe I was a few years ago, right like
00:44:31that's fine like josh once gave away a car out on the verge for like and he was like in the back of a
00:44:34Ford like giving away a car like I remember we've done all the things
00:44:38And we've had all the experiences. I think what the thing that i'm just
00:44:42really
00:44:43Settled on is it's too hard to convey the nuance
00:44:48We just end up over communicating about the advertising why the advertising didn't affect us
00:44:51Than about the journalism and I would rather just spend our time focused on the journalism. That's fair
00:44:56I mean, I feel like that argument is the same one
00:44:59For why you won't shut up about this on our site and on the podcast and wherever and why we're doing this episode, right?
00:45:06like I think
00:45:07a thing I have
00:45:09realized over time is that like
00:45:11You're you we're doing this as a publication sort of performatively
00:45:16and it's on purpose right like it is we we are making more out of this than we need to because
00:45:22That is the the tide is pulling the other way
00:45:25Yeah, and look these are very traditional standards. We're talking about right we have
00:45:29Peers and friends at traditional newsrooms who are like, why do you guys talk about this so much?
00:45:33This is just how it works
00:45:35This is what I mean
00:45:35Like we came up with an ethics policy and you were like I have done ethics and it's like no other people have had ethics
00:45:40Yeah, and our ethics policy to be 100% honest was totally stolen from walt mossberg at the wall street journal, right?
00:45:46Like we just boosted theirs and that we've you know, slowly iterated on it over the years
00:45:51This is old stuff
00:45:52But I think the failure of the journalism industry not the media industry the journalism industry is not communicating
00:46:00How the information is made?
00:46:02Every other industry is like look at how cool it is that we made this thing
00:46:06You want to watch a dorito get made there's infinity content that's like watch this corn turn into a dorito
00:46:13And you're like, wow, that's really cool. You want to watch how journalism gets made. No one ever talks about it
00:46:18They're just like here's the story where the new york times don't question us
00:46:21And I I think in this ecosystem
00:46:24When so many creators on social platforms are so powerful and so influential
00:46:28And they talk about how they make this stuff all the time
00:46:30We can play a little bit of that game and all we're really saying is we're doing this the old-fashioned way, right?
00:46:35like
00:46:36We are just gonna remain independent. We have new competitors who have
00:46:41Substantially the same policy as us four or four media substantially the same policies as us, right? I'm not saying this is totally
00:46:47Unexpected I I think the piece of it that's new is we have to communicate it about it very loudly
00:46:53And I think this is a part we can argue about we have to draw much harsher lines
00:46:56To make the message simple enough for the modern internet
00:46:59Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean and I think I think we ultimately land in not that different places, right?
00:47:04Which is that like in a vacuum?
00:47:07This is a sliding scale
00:47:09but we're just
00:47:10We and you in particular are just choosing not to treat this as a sliding scale
00:47:13Because like i'm just going to live all the way at the top
00:47:15Because it is a slippery and hard to explain slope as soon as you start going down it
00:47:20uh, and that's fine I buy that logic it is uh,
00:47:23I would say there are probably people who work at vox media who wish you would be a little less
00:47:28We would make so much money if I read the ads. I just want to be there it is like I don't want to
00:47:32I'm not going to shade this we would make a ton of money if we read the ads and actually
00:47:36another weird piece of
00:47:38Our structure and being a media company and making traditional journalism is that if david and I were just creators
00:47:44Literally, we would make the money if we read the ads. Yes
00:47:48like individually, we would just cash the checks and then
00:47:51you know buy buy cars like
00:47:54That's what I would do. I would do i'd make david buy an oled tv
00:47:58We don't do that
00:48:00We the company cashes the checks and then we use it to pay for our newsroom, right?
00:48:04and we've got this huge newsroom behind us that does most of the work that we just talk about in the show and
00:48:10I like that. I want to keep making journalism jobs. I
00:48:13I want to keep hiring 22 year olds
00:48:15Who have no idea what they're doing and watch them graduate and go to senior positions and start their own things in the future
00:48:19We've done a lot of that over 13 years and that's just because of the revenue. So yeah, we could make a lot more money
00:48:26We wouldn't make it as individuals maybe we could fund our newsroom, but I think we would
00:48:31We would end up destroying the core value of the newsroom and you can see
00:48:35Many of our competitors that have made those kinds of deals or made those kinds of trade-offs
00:48:39Do not exist anymore, right?
00:48:40Because ultimately the only thing you're really selling is your credibility and once you let that go it's gone
00:48:45right, and there's a I mean like
00:48:47You you can draw a straight line from the end of that sentence to and this is why we did the subscription, right?
00:48:52Like it is it just it it aligns all of that stuff much more cleanly when the people who?
00:48:58Consume our stuff are the ones who pay for that stuff. There's just no
00:49:02Weirdness in that circle in a way that is really really clarifying and helpful
00:49:07yeah, I think I think it's challenging and like I said
00:49:11We would make a lot more money if I read the ads like it's not lost on me and it is
00:49:16Helen is one side of the firewall and i'm the other and i'm the one who says we're not gonna make that money
00:49:21That that money is that money is too expensive
00:49:24Right is like a way that I think about it. It's to cost too much to make this money
00:49:29We will not make more money in the future
00:49:30We'll just make it in the beginning and then we'll be
00:49:32Now we'll be competing against people who will do even worse things that we will not do and I don't want to compete with them
00:49:37and the good news
00:49:39Weirdly is that the more we stay harsh the more we are differentiated
00:49:44The more stable the demand remains right people want to buy advertising on our site
00:49:49Because
00:49:50Big brands want to buy advertising on our site because they know they can't buy us
00:49:54Which is weird. That's just a weird outcome in the right in the media ecosystem
00:49:58Lots of ceos want to come on decoder all the time because they they know they can't tell me what to do
00:50:05And like I think a lot of them want to prove to their teams that they can take the heat
00:50:10Weird, that's just a weird. It's a counterintuitive notion in a world where a bunch of you know
00:50:16Like casey newton is always joking with me that the podcast ecosystem is like
00:50:20You can pick two names out of a hat and they've interviewed each other on a podcast
00:50:24And there's like rules and like a lot of them are programmed and like
00:50:27Whatever right a lot of it is branded content is bought and paid for and we're not and because we're so loud about it
00:50:33We have a long list of incoming
00:50:36We're not lacking for people who want to show up and and talk on our show
00:50:39So I there's greater value there over the long term and being focused on that long term is really hard
00:50:44and I mean it's ecosystem that
00:50:46Quite frankly is like dying by the day
00:50:48So that's where part of subscriptions come in is like how do we make something healthy and resilient?
00:50:52How do we diversify our revenue and then how do we make sure that we're still selling the thing that we're selling?
00:50:56Which is independence
00:50:58All right, that's good. All right. Wait, can we we have to address why liam gets to read the ads?
00:51:02Oh, yeah, sure. Okay. Well here let me let me play the next question, which I think is a good way to get into this
00:51:08Hi, julian joseph here calling from my closet. Sorry. Just want to do a david
00:51:13Intro there
00:51:14Yeah, i'm just curious actually about how you decide to do ads on the show in particular
00:51:21Y'all talked about this a little bit, but i'm really curious on how you make the decision on who reads those ads
00:51:27I remember at some point nilai was
00:51:30Reading some hubspot ads. This was at least I want to say a few years ago
00:51:36I don't forget because I used to work at salesforce
00:51:39But yeah, i'm just curious how you make that decision on who's going to read the ads whether or not somebody
00:51:45Who is actually a host of the show versus producer versus somebody else?
00:51:50It seems like there was a change at some point made
00:51:53Perhaps to give a little bit more distance
00:51:55I noticed other shows do this differently. I've been thinking about a bit as I start to do some consulting
00:52:01Myself and thinking about paid partnerships and what that actually looks like and yeah
00:52:05I'd just love to get a little bit more insight on how you make those decisions
00:52:09So, there you go you knew the frame of the question I just want to get more people's voices onto the show
00:52:14I do like the fake david intro
00:52:17You'd be alarmed at how often i'm in my closet recording. Yeah, you'd be alarmed at how often david is faking the intro
00:52:21He's like i'm riding a horse. He's like doing the coconuts in the closet. How dare you?
00:52:26How dare you?
00:52:28This is the inside baseball man, that's what people want david has so many coconuts in his closet
00:52:34So, yeah, why why liam
00:52:36So the the the reality of we would make a lot more money if we read the ads is real
00:52:41Right, and that is just demand in the market that what they want is host reads what they want is what david is talking about
00:52:46Personal experience they are trying to trade on the trust you have with the voices you're hearing
00:52:51That's advertising. That is just fundamentally how advertising works. They're like you trust this person
00:52:57Now they will sell you a cell phone and that if you watch television advertising like
00:53:02Random snl celebrity selling you verizon. That's just a thing that is happening left and right
00:53:07So that's like the foundation of advertising and I honestly I have no
00:53:12Like moral complaints about that
00:53:14That's how that industry works and it's worked for a long time
00:53:16And I think people understand it where I think it gets dicey is we as journalists should not be endorsing things
00:53:21especially as product reviewers
00:53:23And here's other categories where it maybe it makes it makes sense
00:53:26But we do so much product reviewing that we should not be anywhere near products
00:53:30At the same time we know the demand in the market is there
00:53:33So our solution here is that liam is a character on a show. He is a familiar voice
00:53:38But he is just the producer of the show. He's not writing product reviews for the site
00:53:42He doesn't editorial control over the show
00:53:43Which I have a lot of sympathy for liam being the producer of the show that the editor-in-chief hosts
00:53:49real pain in the ass
00:53:51huge huge pain in the ass
00:53:53Uh, so
00:53:55It's just insulated enough and then the rule is liam doesn't get to do anything except read the copy that is delivered to him
00:54:01So there's not even that back and forth weirdness
00:54:05We think that's a good solution, right? We think it
00:54:09Matches with the experience. Everybody else has another podcast, which is like here's a familiar voice reading this thing. It's not our voices
00:54:17Right, so we solve that problem and and maybe we've gotten it wrong. You should tell us
00:54:21But it it it creates enough of the same product where our sales team can go into the market and compete
00:54:28Without causing all the downstream problems because it's not us
00:54:33And like in a very real way, it's not us
00:54:35I'm open to the feedback
00:54:37But I I think there's enough division there where i'm not
00:54:40The nuance isn't being crushed or i'm not relying on the nuance like it's a different person
00:54:44I will say my dream
00:54:46For the longest time has been to bring back the hype desk and have an on-staff influencer who just lives on the hype desk
00:54:52Yep, this is the loneliest job in america. You get to be part of the verge, but not in the newsroom
00:54:57And your job is to just do branded content
00:55:00And never talk to anyone in the newsroom because you have to maintain the wall
00:55:03You can see why no one has signed up for this job
00:55:07Like be alone be the thing you can buy in the verge that it's totally isolated from everyone else
00:55:11Does not seem like a great job, but it's one of the other ways we've we've thought about the solution here
00:55:17I don't know if that's ever going to happen, but it's i'm i'm we're trying to find ways to be competitive in the market
00:55:23and still preserve
00:55:25The the credibility that is fundamentally the thing we're selling. All right, but liam's here liam
00:55:29Do you have anything to add to this? Yeah, I would just say I get ad requests on a regular basis
00:55:33It's not something I communicate to neely or david at all
00:55:37They have no idea what ads i've read that week and what get included in the show
00:55:41So that's one of the ways we create that boundary
00:55:44Yeah, I do enjoy the emails I get every week from people complaining about one ad or another
00:55:48That's how I find out who advertises on our show most of the time is from people who are mad about it
00:55:52So those emails are really interesting. I I think they're they're proof that people can't tell the difference
00:55:59Right that that it's all one experience and mostly our competitors
00:56:03Take responsibility for the whole experience. Yeah, that's fine. We we just don't and like
00:56:09That's I think that's weird I think it's dissonant for a lot of people but I fundamentally I I don't know
00:56:16if you can
00:56:17Keep them separate while you're taking the junkets and while you're accepting the brand deals and negotiating the rates. I
00:56:23Maybe some creators can again. There's lots of them who have
00:56:27Really laid out exactly what they will and want to michael fisher. Mr
00:56:30Mobile has been very complimentary of our ethics policy over the years
00:56:33He has done an excellent job of laying out what he will and won't do and how it will work for him
00:56:37But he still takes the money right and like you've got to trust him. I think a lot of people do I think I
00:56:42Think that's a reasonable position to take like he's laid it out. He's been explicit. He's very clear
00:56:47That's not every creator
00:56:49And I think that's too hard for us at scale
00:56:52I can't run a whole newsroom being like i've made up some rules like
00:56:55It has to be simple and it has to be simple for the audience
00:56:58Yeah, all right. We have a few more quicker ones that are less about nila's feelings about ads
00:57:04Uh, let's just plow through these before we have to take a break. Let me let me play you a couple
00:57:08Uh, this I think might have been my favorite question. We got this entire time
00:57:12Hey those casters i've been listening to your podcast for forever and i've always wondered what exactly happened during ad breaks
00:57:19Do you like chat for five minutes and then return?
00:57:22Or do you resume recording immediately?
00:57:24Thanks
00:57:26Do people want to know nila? I'm so sad about this
00:57:29This is a real
00:57:31We're going to destroy your suspension
00:57:34I'm, really sorry about this. Like I I don't want to tell you
00:57:39We don't know we just say okay we got to stop and then we hit
00:57:43A button to pause the recording and then another button to start again. We just keep going
00:57:48Sometimes we get seltzers. I would say that's like the main ad break activity is is a beverage
00:57:53But the the show is not recorded in real time
00:57:57There are people out there who want us to do the verge cast live
00:58:00More, uh, I would say that's a thing we will probably do occasionally
00:58:03But there are people who are like I want the unedited live version of the verge cast and i'm like it would blow your mind
00:58:11No, you don't
00:58:14Yeah, we just are like we should take a break all right
00:58:16We're back like literally in the same breath. I say those words sometimes. Yeah
00:58:20Yeah. All right. That's a good one. Uh, all right. This is like finding out that they do jeopardy all in one day
00:58:25And they just change their clothes like I was heartbroken. Okay
00:58:28I had a friend very recently who won several episodes of jeopardy in a row
00:58:33and i've only gotten like bits and pieces of the process of how they do it and it is it was like
00:58:37A hundred years ago. He filmed like a week's worth of stuff in an afternoon like just insane
00:58:42And it has ruined jeopardy for me forever
00:58:45I don't even it's fine, but I hate it. I can't watch it anymore
00:58:48The only thing the only thing I will say about jeopardy one more thing on jeopardy
00:58:51I'm, not prone to believe conspiracies exist because often too many people have to keep a secret
00:58:56Right like we landed on the moon
00:58:57I know we land on the moon because not enough people could keep the secret and we faked the moon landing for this long
00:59:01Agreed and then you're like they keep jeopardy a secret for a long time and you're like
00:59:05What are the drones doing over new jersey? Like that's fully where my head goes every time. I don't know
00:59:10I'm sure jeopardy is like a fully autonomous show
00:59:13There's like the room is just always there recording and people just come in and make a show sometimes
00:59:18And the people who know like never leave the room exactly. Yeah, they live there
00:59:22It's fine to any of our listeners who enjoy the great british bake-off do not look up how they make that show
00:59:28It will ruin it for you
00:59:30Yeah, that's good. You asked us what we do during the ad breaks and now we've ruined a baking show. We're doing great
00:59:34We're so sorry. Uh, all right next up
00:59:38Hi verge gas john rocos here two things for you first ever since you started doing all these additional podcasts
00:59:44It's like it's like so many podcasts. I loved it so much better when it was concise and it was just
00:59:49Just the friday episode because now it's super hard for me to keep up with my other podcasts
00:59:54Because all these podcasts are so good. I just subscribed. I love you guys. Keep up the great work. Thank you
01:00:00So I wanted to pick this one because this is a question
01:00:02We've gotten a bunch which is basically like we do a lot more verge cast than we used to
01:00:07Uh, and that is part of what you brought me here to do a couple of years ago
01:00:12Uh, do you want to do you want to explain how we think about the verge cast now?
01:00:16Yeah, I mean, you know part of the answer is it's your job to figure it out
01:00:18But the thing that i'm reacting to most is the idea that we used to be concise
01:00:25I don't yeah, I don't know if you listened to our first album. That was like a you know, a quadruple sided
01:00:31prog rock exploration
01:00:33It was it was not concise
01:00:35Sandinista is what we made. I remember the early days of the verge
01:00:39We would record in the studio in our office at four o'clock
01:00:43And we would leave it like 6 30 like physically exhausted at the end of some episodes. It's like I can't talk anymore
01:00:50after this episode
01:00:52Yeah, uh, so, uh, I appreciate that in the in the over the haze of time we
01:00:58Concision has been added to our list of qualities
01:01:01I actually think having more episodes lets us be more focused
01:01:05Because we're not trying to cram every idea into one thing and really as you run a media company of whatever size
01:01:12You start to realize you have to make more focused products
01:01:15They have things have to go find their audiences
01:01:17Our tiktok channel doesn't really look anything like our home page and our home page doesn't really look anything like our youtube channel
01:01:21And that's just how it goes
01:01:23You know and for the podcast in particular
01:01:27I think we know that the friday show
01:01:30Has a big audience that does not want us to mess with it too much
01:01:34And there's just too much to fit into this show and the tuesday show is
01:01:38Is allowed to tell more narrative kinds of stories and build its own audience. It wants a different kind of thing. So
01:01:43my recommendation to
01:01:45anyone who thinks you're doing too much podcast is
01:01:48figure out what you want from us and that we have probably provided to you and
01:01:53That's a way for us to grow the audience
01:01:56As opposed to just extracting more from the audience we have and that's really what we're after is we want to grow our audience particularly
01:02:03Like new audience people have not encountered us before we want to go find them with stories that are interesting and bring them into
01:02:07The fold and you do that with focus. Yep. That's a good answer. I have no notes
01:02:12David's like i'm doing three more episodes. Yeah, listen eight days a week first. Yes. Here we go
01:02:16Uh, all right one more and then we're going to take a break
01:02:19Hey, this is leo calling from beautiful holland michigan
01:02:22Hey, I got a question about the verge cast meta episode and maybe a little bit of an axe to grind
01:02:27Hey, i'm wondering you guys a couple years ago went through all the work to make this beautiful redesign and rebrand of the theme song
01:02:33And all that i'm an audio podcast listener. So maybe this isn't true on the uh, youtube version, but
01:02:38You guys have this great theme song and then a year or two later you chopped it down
01:02:41So we just had bum bum bum bum bum, which is a little bit of a bummer
01:02:46And now for the last month or two, it's just been bum bum bum bum
01:02:49Welcome to the verge cast and what what's the deal? Do you think we don't have the attention span for it?
01:02:54Is this the tick tockification of the show love to hear your thoughts about why the theme song's been trimmed. Thanks guys of the show
01:03:01Yeah, liam. Why is the theme song been trimmed?
01:03:04Good question. Uh, he was close with the tick tockification. It's not quite tick tock though. It's youtube
01:03:10uh, we want the youtube to match the audio feed and on youtube starting out with a big long theme song is just kind of
01:03:18You know not something people will sit through so we made a compromise and shortened it down
01:03:23Um, but I think this person's right. I don't really like it either. So
01:03:26eric our our audio engineer and I we're gonna go back to the drawing board and see see what we can do with our
01:03:32theme song to
01:03:33Refresh it and not be so
01:03:35Um jarring for like that's the third episode every week is just the full theme song. We should just publish it. There you go
01:03:41I love that. Yeah, can we sell ads against that?
01:03:44We had a lot of fun breakmaster cylinder who also did the decoder theme song did the revamped?
01:03:49Verge cast theme. I don't this is just some lore
01:03:53Josh topolsky wrote the verges theme and really we were listening to that mgmt song that everyone liked
01:03:58You can see there's a direct line. Oh, yeah of inspiration there. So then we had that one. It was great
01:04:02Uh, and then we don't we don't have the stems like josh
01:04:06He just like made it on his computer and like here's the thing like we made it
01:04:10All lost the mists of time
01:04:12So we had to like redo it so we could do all the stuff david's doing on the tuesday episodes with music beds and stuff
01:04:17Like we just needed more stuff
01:04:20So this was a good time to like make more stuff and it was really fun to work with breakmaster cylinder
01:04:24And there i've always been worried that we made it too aggressive
01:04:28Like it's a cool thing to listen to
01:04:30But like there's like a saxophone break. Yeah, which you if memory serves specifically requested
01:04:37In the theme song I did it was my idea
01:04:40So I think it's good. I think I like I like that people like it. Um
01:04:43but it that's just the lore of it is
01:04:46Like literally josh made the original theme and garage band like overnight
01:04:51And like all lost to the mists of time
01:04:54Uh, like i've asked him like it's just gone like it's not gonna come back
01:04:58So we just needed to remake it and we had an opportunity to do it
01:05:01We should use it more though because it is very good. It is very good
01:05:04uh
01:05:04and by the way
01:05:05If you want to blame youtube for it, you should but you should specifically blame youtube music and the way that it interacts with youtube
01:05:11And just the truly insane way that youtube is abrupt podcast
01:05:15But that is for another show
01:05:16All right
01:05:16We gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and we're gonna grab bag our way through the rest of these questions
01:05:19We'll be right back
01:05:24Support for this show comes from service now the ai platform for business transformation
01:05:29You've heard the big hype around ai but the truth is ai is only as powerful as the platform. It's built into
01:05:35Service now is the platform that puts ai to work for people across your business
01:05:40Removing friction and frustration for your employees supercharging productivity for your developers
01:05:45Providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make customers happier
01:05:49All that is built into a single platform that you can use right now. That is why the world works with service now
01:05:55Visit service now.com ai for people to learn more
01:05:59Support for the verge cast comes from grammarly
01:06:02You might have someone on your team who's always saying you need another tool to boost productivity
01:06:06We've all got our david pierce
01:06:08But let's be real all these so-called efficiency tools can actually leave your work feeling scattered and totally draining
01:06:15What's worse is they might be burning through your budget, too
01:06:18That's why grammarly delivers a consistent communication experience across your organization's ecosystem
01:06:24So roadblocks at work get unblocked fast best of all it only takes days to implement
01:06:30So no it overhead required so you can unify your team and see results right away
01:06:36Grammarly seamlessly works across 500 000 web and desktop apps and grammarly stats say your company will get 25
01:06:43Faster time to resolution for support tickets 52 less time spent writing sales emails and you can potentially save 19 days
01:06:51Per year per employee. I personally use grammarly for every email
01:06:55I send out to a guest for this podcast and it's just great peace of mind knowing I haven't made any typos
01:07:01You can join the 70 000 teams and 3 million people who trust grammarly to work faster everywhere
01:07:07They communicate just go to grammarly.com slash enterprise to learn more
01:07:12That's grammarly.com slash enterprise grammarly enterprise ready ai
01:07:18All right, we're back with nilai patel
01:07:20We have some more questions nilai took one sip of water during that ad break
01:07:24No, we talked for five minutes nilai and I sat for five minutes
01:07:28Listen to the ads
01:07:30Uh, all right, let's run through a few more. So this is kind of a grab bag set of questions
01:07:36we got a lot of people who just have
01:07:37Questions about the verge how we work how we're thinking about things
01:07:41So we're just gonna we're gonna plow through a bunch of as fast as we can sound good
01:07:44Yeah, fabulous. All right. Here's the first one
01:07:47Hey guys, now that the verge has gone subscription. He's got me wondering about the verge redesign again
01:07:52Uh, I make websites and digital products and things for a living and the redesign was kind of huge
01:07:58it kind of felt a little bit like ben thompson's aggregation theory of like
01:08:02aggregating stuff from other sources and pulling the value of your own home page and
01:08:06i'm curious how it works just like
01:08:08As a person who does this for a living?
01:08:10Did it work to what extent did it work? Should I apply the same theory other websites?
01:08:15A lot of any insights you can give. Thanks. Bye
01:08:19So we got a couple versions of this question
01:08:20So just to just to make it very slightly broader than this the the question we got several times was essentially
01:08:26It's been a little over two years since our redesign
01:08:29We've done the subscription which is obviously another huge change to what the verge is doing looking back. Did the redesign work?
01:08:36Yes
01:08:36And it's actually really funny. You mentioned ben thompson because when we launched the redesign he was like
01:08:40Oh, that's aggregation theory and I went onto his podcast and talked about it for an hour
01:08:44Nice because that is exactly what it is
01:08:46If you have a big direct audience that you are already serving
01:08:49The easiest thing to do is make the product more useful
01:08:54And I actually got this idea in a pretty tangential way
01:08:57We had done a bunch of surveys about how people felt about different tech companies
01:09:01and the most loved tech companies were google and amazon every year that we ran the survey and apple is actually kind of the
01:09:06Bottom of the list of the big tech companies and we were just like trying to figure out why and it's like oh
01:09:10These are utilities
01:09:12People use google and amazon every single day
01:09:14And they kind of don't they just like use to hold their iphones to use google
01:09:18And that probably has shaped a bunch of our coverage
01:09:20But it also shaped a bunch of our product thinking which is people come to our home page every day
01:09:24And we should make it as useful as possible
01:09:27And then people will come back
01:09:29And this has come up also with blue sky recently and the way they treat links
01:09:35Like I think they've been pretty open like we're part of the web
01:09:37We will send you away because we know if we send you away to high quality things you are more likely to come back
01:09:43Yep
01:09:44That the same idea we've had the whole time. We will send you away. We are happy to link out
01:09:48We're happy to link to our competitors. We have some ideas about how to make that
01:09:52more seamless in a world of paywalls
01:09:56Stay tuned
01:09:57um
01:09:58But we we just know that making our own product more useful
01:10:03After two years has worked right time spent our home page has gone up by like minutes
01:10:08No one can move that number like it is an impossible number to move on almost every product
01:10:12And our redesign accomplish it because there's just more to look at and more places to go and then people come back
01:10:17yeah, the idea of a home page was
01:10:20Like an open question not very long ago
01:10:23I mean like one of the things we talked about you showed me the very early versions of this
01:10:28before I came back and
01:10:30I had come from a place where we were having genuine conversations about like is it even worth having and caring for a home page?
01:10:37and I think uh
01:10:38I would say both history and the rest of the media industry has proven home page is pretty much correct the last couple years
01:10:44And not to harp on this because david hears me harp on this all the time, but it is just about owning your own distribution
01:10:50Right. This is why people have email newsletters
01:10:51They can email it to you directly and there's not an algorithm between you and the audience. Our home page is just us
01:10:56Here's a feed of stuff we liked
01:10:58and you can
01:11:00Come look at our list of things that we liked and people I think people enjoy that because they know that we made it
01:11:05Not the facebook algorithm made it or the x algorithm made or whatever. So
01:11:11There's some value there. I don't know if that's a thing you can just like cold start
01:11:14Because it only works if you have an audience
01:11:17It might work if you can communicate to a big enough audience that this is what you're doing
01:11:21There's continual value there
01:11:23But the idea that your product should directly be the most valuable thing that you make and you can show it to people
01:11:29Then you're you don't
01:11:30Let someone someone else's distribution get in the way
01:11:33That is everywhere in media right now
01:11:35Right that is every newsletter author that is every home page redesign that you're seeing. It's oh, we got to take control of our distribution
01:11:42Yeah, totally agree. Um, all right next up. We have a question from clemente who says
01:11:47Uh, i'm a huge fan of the economists and I especially love their print editions
01:11:51Uh, there's something quite different sitting down with a nice thick magazine with a bunch of amazing art
01:11:56Uh, you guys could take a page from the onion and come out with a couple of editions a year
01:12:00Maybe including your best long form pieces
01:12:03Would the verge ever come out in print? We're the last website on earth. Would we ever be print?
01:12:08That's clemente's question and we have I want to excuse things like content goblins, which is amazing
01:12:14Yeah, everyone made a lot of should get so we're past but like I think I think the question is like an ongoing
01:12:19Sort of serious print product of our journalism. Is that a thing?
01:12:22You'd ever be will we print out the website and mail it to you several times a year, but like pretty
01:12:27pretty yeah
01:12:29Maybe like the world's most qualified maybe
01:12:32in the qualifications are a number of things have to
01:12:37Go our way in unlikely directions
01:12:39For that to be worth our time
01:12:41Um, I want to do it which is why it's maybe I think it would be really fun
01:12:46And i've only ever worked in digital media and i've always just been jealous of print covers
01:12:51Everybody who's listened to show has heard me say I just want to circle things around and I watch
01:12:55David haskell the editor-in-chief of new york magazine
01:12:58He really does just print out the thing and like look at the layouts
01:13:02That's awesome. Yeah, right. It's cool. It's a lot of work
01:13:06Like closing every issue of new york magazine we we watch them do it
01:13:10They they work on the floor just above us in the new york office. It's a lot of work and it
01:13:15That's a 50 year old legendary magazine and the work is worth it. We would have to just start all that from scratch
01:13:21And so maybe we can do it in some small ways
01:13:22Maybe we can do more regular zines maybe and build our way up to it
01:13:25That's that's the set of unlikely things that has to break our way
01:13:29It there's nothing stopping us from doing it. It's just a whole other set of work
01:13:32that
01:13:34You know time is a zero-sum commodity like we would just have to
01:13:39Stop doing some other work to do that
01:13:41Yeah. All right. I would personally love to do it just because I want back at wired
01:13:45they used to have like a row of
01:13:47Vertical touch screens and they would put a page up on each one and literally like page through the whole magazine on this
01:13:52It was awesome. I want that so bad
01:13:55I don't think it worked, but it was cool
01:13:58They didn't seem to do any work they just showed it to people and that was awesome
01:14:02Uh, all right next question, uh, we're gonna do two more and then i'll let you get out of here
01:14:07Uh, here is one that I very much enjoyed
01:14:10It's the particularly nila question
01:14:14Hello, um, my name is nick i'm calling from minnesota. This is a question for the meta
01:14:21Lowercase m how does the verge cast or the verge work episode nila often says?
01:14:28um
01:14:29that
01:14:30The verge is like a montessori and he just lets people pursue their passions
01:14:35Um, but I would like to know a little bit more about the nuts and bolts of that. There obviously must be some check-ins
01:14:42And you know, how do you make sure people are moving forward on projects or choosing the right projects?
01:14:48or
01:14:49Pursuing passions that are relevant to your audience
01:14:52um
01:14:52I am finishing a master's degree in organizational leadership
01:14:56So these types of people management and organizational development questions are really interesting to me i'd also like to know how has
01:15:04That shifted as the verge has grown, right?
01:15:07It's easy to run a montessori style team when you have a team of six and maybe harder when there's a team of I don't
01:15:13Know a hundred and something anyway
01:15:15Bye. Bye
01:15:17I did a decoder question for you. Oh boy
01:15:19Yeah, if you'd like to hear me, uh contend with that question, I spent an hour a week doing therapy with ceos
01:15:25And that's all that show is yep. How do I do this? Can you tell me do you know?
01:15:29Do you know how you're doing it and the answers are often much more appealing than anyone wants them to be?
01:15:34uh
01:15:35It was easier at the beginning. That's actually the first thing. Uh,
01:15:38You know, there's still a handful of co-founders on our team sean holster thomas ricker
01:15:42Like we're all here. David was like employee number one
01:15:45I think all of us remember
01:15:47When it was like 15 people in one room and we solved every decision by all yelling at each other
01:15:52Yep, because no one had kids
01:15:56That's that's all we did
01:15:58That's 24 hours a day in one room yelling at each other and that's how we did everything
01:16:02And there was a purity to that. I think it came out in the product
01:16:05I think you could see it in the product. It came out in the stress levels. Uh,
01:16:09certainly
01:16:10It came out in the alcohol use. Um
01:16:13That is totally not scalable. I like I have as much
01:16:17Fond recollection of our startup days as anyone it was fun
01:16:22It was you can't run an organization that way and even if you're doing the startup days
01:16:26You still should stop it as soon as you can
01:16:29um, that's just not how to do it so that
01:16:32And now we're bigger, right?
01:16:33Uh, we're much bigger and we're totally distributed. We're not even all in the same room anymore
01:16:38So we have had to come up with a bunch of other ways to communicate what we're doing and why we're doing and how we do
01:16:43it
01:16:43um
01:16:44I think the job as the editor-in-chief is just
01:16:47scaling taste
01:16:48Like all the publication is is a taste
01:16:51At the end of the day, that's all it is. Like that's what
01:16:54Matters, but here's some stuff that's in here's some stuff that's out. That's the whole publication
01:16:59So for us, it's just a lot of conversations about that
01:17:02Why is this a verge story and is this good enough or the only two questions? I think I consistently ask
01:17:08Everything else is kind of just like on the margin like tactical like did you talk to this person or have we written a good?
01:17:12Headline, but the two questions we come back to that the whole team is kind of always asking
01:17:16Is why is this vert story and is this good enough?
01:17:18If you get everyone doing that all the time, you don't have to police it
01:17:22Right, because everyone knows that they're allowed to ask those questions to each other and that they should know the answers
01:17:27And the answer to is this good enough? It's almost always no right, right?
01:17:31Like that's the right answer that question and then then it's like well
01:17:34We have to get out the door like we're in a race
01:17:36We gotta get the story at the door
01:17:37We'll fix it later or something or it's I need to go back and make it better
01:17:40And as long as everyone agrees that those are the shape of those questions
01:17:44And that you should be prepared to answer them then you're fine
01:17:47Like you can really trust everyone to go as fast as they can
01:17:50Because at the end of the day everyone is asking themselves those questions and prepared to ask one another those questions
01:17:56Yeah, that's pretty good. And yeah for more listen to neil. I talk on decoder just incessantly all the time how you do this
01:18:04Yeah
01:18:05You joke that you started doing that show to learn how to manage and uh, it feels more and more true every episode
01:18:10But the thing that you're realizing is that no one is good
01:18:13And so it's like I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse but
01:18:18What is it can you say it out loud something about doors and decisions
01:18:22That's all I know. Uh, all right last one and then i'm gonna let you go
01:18:25Uh, this is a question from jeffrey
01:18:26Uh, this is going to sound like a really self-aggrandizing way to end this but this is a question
01:18:31We actually get a lot and I think it's interesting to answer
01:18:33Uh, jeffrey says what can we all do to ensure the viability longevity and success of the verge?
01:18:38Obviously the simple answer is subscribing
01:18:40But I think it's worth it to remind your loyal audience about the need to support the website whether it's through subscribing or other
01:18:44methods
01:18:44I have the site bookmarked and check it several times a day consuming ads and giving you clicks and theoretically some amount of revenue
01:18:50And bypassing the google search algorithm and the associated ills
01:18:52Are there other metrics that help you show your reach and popularity that verge lovers should be using do article shares matter?
01:18:57Should I click every affiliate link just to help you out?
01:18:59Should I be following my favorite verge writers and other social media x blue sky mastodon, etc
01:19:03First of all, jeffrey. I love you for asking this question
01:19:05Yeah, uh, and second of all, this is a question
01:19:07we get a lot and I think goes back to what you're talking about at the beginning of like
01:19:11Of people want the stuff that they like to succeed, right?
01:19:14It's why people cheer on their creators for getting brand deals
01:19:17It means you get to keep doing this right? Like we we want our favorite teams to win. Uh
01:19:22What does that look like for the verge?
01:19:24Throwing out give us 50 a year, which you should do come be part of the community and
01:19:30Comment mean things on all of nila's stories. Uh
01:19:33What else goes on that list for you?
01:19:35I've just come to accept that our competitors are not other publications. They are creators
01:19:42I think that's fine. I I hope you've heard me say over and over again. I wish them all the best
01:19:47I think some of them do excellent work
01:19:49I hope they're even I hope all of them are successful on their own terms and they build their own businesses and
01:19:54Everyone does a great job and has a good time
01:19:57We make something different
01:19:59Right and that that's fine. Like our product is differentiated from
01:20:03The creator ecosystem by dint of the fact that we have our own distribution that we have
01:20:07Whatever traditional journalistic ethics policy. I have all this stuff
01:20:12The thing that I think would help us the most in that ecosystem
01:20:15is by having the same kinds of audiences that creators have
01:20:19that are talking about them and
01:20:22like if you look at the comment section like a robust dialogue about what the creator is doing and why they're doing it and like
01:20:28They evangelize for their the people
01:20:31And I I don't know that any media organizations have contended with that fact
01:20:36like as a group
01:20:39The journalism industry has been too high and mighty for too long
01:20:44I that is just a failure. I see that failure. I perceive that failure very clearly
01:20:48I think most people perceive that failure and you kind of have the jeff bezos's of the world
01:20:54being like
01:20:56You trust the media less than congress the media will have even less of an opinion now
01:21:00Right. That's what he's doing with the post right patrick
01:21:03Soon-shung at the at the la times billionaire owner of the other times is going to add a bias meter to their stories
01:21:08An ai-powered bias meter to their stories
01:21:11So you can push a button and like read the other version like the unbiased version of the story
01:21:15This is the most undercutty thing you can do to a newsroom possible. Yeah
01:21:19These are just reactions the idea that people don't trust the media
01:21:22Okay, I I think those are wrong, especially for our kind of newsroom
01:21:26Which is inherently evaluative
01:21:28Like I we hold the phone and i'm like seven
01:21:31There's no there it is like right. There's there's straightforwardly. We're like, this is bad like all the time
01:21:37so I think it's better for us to say we're in a relationship with your audience and it's going to be the same kind of
01:21:43personal relationship for lack of a better word parasocial relationship, uh, where we're real people that you know and
01:21:50We're accountable to you the way that creators I think feel accountable to our audiences on these platforms
01:21:54There's a lot of dynamics in there that I think are are hard
01:21:57But what i'm boiling my answer down to is like you should care about us. You should communicate with us
01:22:02You should communicate to other people
01:22:04about why what you're getting from us is different or hopefully better than what you're getting from everything else because that's really
01:22:11At the end I don't want to do a bunch of marketing about our ethics policy
01:22:14I want to have an audience. It's like this ethics policy is important to us and see more places try to copy it
01:22:21To increase the quality of the media that people consume
01:22:25That's a big goal. I I just can't do that on my own and that's I think the way you can help
01:22:29But also like follow us on blue sky, right? Yeah, but yeah, but also you might as well buy every affiliate product
01:22:35I don't even know how it works. Well, I do that. Uh, just send me a check personally
01:22:40Um, I actually think that's the one you shouldn't do. I think if you send me like a personal check
01:22:45I will read your name on the show. Um
01:22:48Uh, but yeah the the high-minded thing that just in the back of my head all the time is
01:22:55if we are successful doing it this way we might
01:22:59Push some people to try and copy
01:23:02How we talk about our ethics policy and the making of the journalism and the independence you can see it
01:23:08with the independent newsletter folks
01:23:10Right that it's happening over there. You can see what the 404 media I don't I'm not saying copying us
01:23:14But you can see that there's a response
01:23:18It to the void of that stuff
01:23:20By talking about it more and i'm just sort of like hopeful
01:23:24that if we can build audiences
01:23:27That
01:23:28Like openly say in the market. This is the thing we like
01:23:32Then there will be more supply of it
01:23:35It's pretty good. All right
01:23:37You need to go. Yeah, I quit that was my last day. David's in charge now. He's gonna read all the ads
01:23:42Let's go post red ads forever
01:23:45Uh, yeah nilai, uh, we got lots more questions
01:23:48So we'll we'll find some other time to to keep going through some of these things
01:23:51uh
01:23:52but thank you to everybody who emailed and called and keep stuff coming we got we got
01:23:57Lots of stuff left to do lots of stuff to figure out on the subscription
01:24:00Lots of new ideas about vergecast stuff. Um, if you want me to read more ads tell me
01:24:05It won't work, but you can tell them anyway, nilai. Thank you as always. Thank you
01:24:10All right before we go liam come back just for one second. Sure
01:24:13What's going on, uh, we just made some ces plans, um, you know them better than I do
01:24:17So tell the people what our ces plans are. Absolutely. Uh, the virtual will be back at ces this year
01:24:23Uh, but what's special is that this year we're doing a live vergecast. It's going to be on january 8th
01:24:28Which is the wednesday of ces week. It'll be free and open to the public
01:24:33Um, and yeah
01:24:34We're we're hoping to get a bunch of people out there to have a good time with us and and just do
01:24:37Live vergecast and talk about ces. Where is it? Are we doing it at like the the vegas stadium with 60 000 people?
01:24:43Is that no we're going to be right on the strip. It's at the
01:24:46Las vegas brooklyn bowl of all places. There's a brooklyn bowl in las vegas. We're bringing new york to vegas. There we go
01:24:53I love it. Um, yeah, we have a couple more episodes, uh between now and the end of the year
01:24:57So we'll we'll keep reminding y'all but if you're going to ces, uh, it's wednesday night come hang out with us
01:25:03It's going to be very fun. I'm told there will be food provided there will food and drinks
01:25:07That's all that matters. All right, liam. Thank you, of course
01:25:11All right, that is it for the verge cast today
01:25:13Thank you to helen and nilai for being here and thank you for listening and thank you especially to everyone
01:25:19Who called and emailed with questions?
01:25:21People are always like oh, why do you do these meta shows? Does anyone care and frankly I wonder this sometimes too, but it's so fun
01:25:28hearing the stuff that you guys want to know and understand and are thinking about and care about and are engaging with us on and
01:25:36We're still figuring all of this stuff out as we go too, right?
01:25:39So this is a super fun thing to get to do with all of you and i'm so so grateful for everyone who did it
01:25:46this is one of my favorite vergi traditions that we do on this show and
01:25:51Incredibly grateful for everyone who is part of it with us. So thank you
01:25:54There's lots more on our subscription on our business on all of the stuff that we've been talking about at the verge.com
01:26:00Nilai's note that he wrote when we first launched the subscription last week
01:26:04I think puts a lot of this in a really good perspective. So i'll make sure that's in the show notes
01:26:08Keep it locked on the website
01:26:10Tell us what you want from the podcast. Tell us what you want from the subscription
01:26:13Tell us what you want from the verge
01:26:15We're here doing this with you and we want to keep hearing from you
01:26:17So like I said, you can always call the hotline. It's six six verge one one ask questions that way
01:26:22Email us verge cast at the verge.com
01:26:25If i'm being completely honest
01:26:26I in particular have been bad about checking the email recently because it just got overrun with spam at one point and it became
01:26:32Kind of annoying to dig through every single day, but I actually think we solved the spam problem
01:26:37I've been better at checking it recently. So keep the emails coming
01:26:40We love hearing from you
01:26:41This show is produced by liam james will pour and eric gomez the verge cast is verge production and part of the vox media podcast network
01:26:48Nilai and I will be back on friday to talk about
01:26:51Somehow the fact that there is still news in mid-december as we wind towards the holidays
01:26:55Plus we have some other fun stuff planned between now and the end of the year. We'll see you then rock and roll