The Verge

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Verge was born from an exodus. Between March and April 2011, up to nine writers, editors, and product developers walked out of Engadget, one of the most-read technology sites on the internet, to build something new. At the time, Engadget was pulling in 14 million unique visitors a month. The people who left did not seem to think that was a reason to stay.

  Leading the departure was Joshua Topolsky, Engadget's editor-in-chief. He brought with him managing editor Nilay Patel, staffers Paul Miller, Ross Miller, Joanna Stern, and Chris Ziegler, along with product developers Justin Glow and Dan Chilton. They did not yet have a name for what they were building. They did not have a website. What they had was a partnership with SB Nation and a belief that technology journalism could be done differently.

  When The Verge launched on the 1st of November 2011, it arrived with 4 million unique visitors and 20 million pageviews in its first accounting. That is not a soft opening. Over the years that followed, the publication grew into one of the most-read technology outlets in the country, developed a network of podcasts, survived internal controversy, fought public battles over copyright, and eventually began asking its readers to pay directly for what it produces. How it got there is a story about the people who built it, the platform that held it together, and the pressures that continue to reshape it.

• 2. The Walk-Out and What Followed

  ›

  Jim Bankoff had a specific reason to pay attention when Topolsky's team left AOL. Bankoff was chairman and CEO of Vox Media, the company behind SB Nation, and he had previously worked at AOL in 2005, where he personally led the acquisition of Engadget. He understood exactly what he was looking at when those nine people walked out.

  Bankoff saw an overlap between SB Nation's audience and the people who read about consumer technology. He also saw room to extend a model that had worked in sports coverage into a new category. Topolsky, for his part, praised SB Nation's commitment to what he described as independent journalism and in-house development of their own content delivery tools. That last detail mattered. The content management system Vox Media was building, called Chorus, was being developed internally by Trei Brundrett, who would later become the company's chief operating officer.

  Before The Verge had a name or a launch date, the displaced team set up an interim site called This Is My Next. It was built around the Engadget podcast that Topolsky, Patel, and Paul Miller had been hosting, and it served as a public placeholder while the real project took shape. By August 2011, the site had reached 1 million unique visitors and 3.4 million page views. By October, monthly unique views had climbed to 3 million, with 10 million total page views. Time included it in its Best Blogs of 2011. The site closed the moment The Verge opened.

• 3. Building the Masthead

  ›

  Tom Warren arrived at The Verge from Neowin, where he had served as editor-in-chief, and from his own site WinRumors. He joined as a United Kingdom-based senior editor, giving the publication its first geographic foothold outside the United States at launch.

  In 2013, the publication added a science vertical called Verge Science, led by Katie Drummond, who came from Wired. That same year, Topolsky announced Verge Video, a dedicated home for the publication's growing catalogue of video content. Patel moved into the editor-in-chief role in mid-2014, replacing Topolsky. That year also saw Dieter Bohn named executive editor. Helen Havlak became editorial director in 2017.

  The team grew further when Vox Media acquired Recode in 2015, bringing journalist Walt Mossberg into the editing operation. The acquisition expanded the publication's reach into the world of business and technology reporting. By 2016, the site's advertising approach had shifted away from display ads matched to article content, toward partnerships and ads calibrated to the individual user rather than the page.

• 4. Controversy and the PC Build

  ›

  In September 2018, The Verge published an article and companion YouTube video titled "How we Built a $2000 Custom Gaming PC." The video's host, Stefan Etienne, demonstrated steps that experienced builders immediately flagged as wrong. Among the errors was the application of an excessive amount of thermal paste onto the processor, which should be applied in a small quantity. The response online was sharp, and it became a harassment campaign directed at Etienne personally.

  The situation took a legal turn in February 2019, when lawyers from Vox Media filed a DMCA takedown notice against YouTube, targeting videos that criticized The Verge's build video and alleging copyright infringement. YouTube removed two of those videos, from channels BitWit and ReviewTechUSA, and issued copyright strikes against both channels. The removal did not hold. After Verge editor Nilay Patel asked YouTube to reinstate the videos, the platform reversed course, though Patel acknowledged he agreed with the legal argument behind the original takedown. Timothy B. Lee, writing for Ars Technica, described the episode as an instance of the Streisand effect and noted that existing legal precedent suggested the critical videos fell within fair use.

  Nearly three years later, PC builder and YouTuber Linus Sebastian worked with Etienne directly on a video called "Fixing the Verge PC build." In that video, Etienne acknowledged he had not been an experienced builder at the time of the original video. He said he had built only four computers before the The Verge shoot, and The Verge build was his first on camera. He also said that before the follow-up video went live, The Verge had been unwilling to hear from him about what he saw as editing problems, and had insisted the original video be uploaded regardless.

• 5. Podcasts as a Platform

  ›

  The Vergecast launched on the 4th of November 2011, three days after the site itself, and it has been the publication's primary audio presence ever since. Its first episodes included a live video stream of the hosts. The show won a Webby People's Voice award in 2013 and earned a Webby nomination in 2026. In early 2024 it expanded to a bi-weekly release schedule, and in October 2025 it introduced a dedicated ad-free feed for subscribers. On the 1st of June 2026, The Verge moved to a daily schedule on The Vergecast.

  A second podcast, The Verge Mobile Show, launched on the 8th of November 2011, four days after The Vergecast. Its focus was mobile phones specifically, and it ran until the 25th of March 2014. Walt Mossberg launched his own podcast through the publication in September 2015: Ctrl-Walt-Delete. He delivered his final regular episode in June 2017, but returned with a special edition on the 11th of May 2018 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the iMac.

  Two other shows expanded the publication's reach into different conversations. The Verge What's Tech, hosted by Christopher Thomas Plante and launched on the 12th of February 2015, aimed at making technology approachable for general audiences. iTunes named it among the best podcasts of 2015. Why'd You Push That Button?, co-hosted by Ashley Carman and Kaitlyn Tiffany, launched in October 2017 and examined the social consequences of technological choices. It won a Podcast Award in the "This Week in Tech Technology Category" in 2018.

  Nilay Patel's Decoder, which launched on the 8th of July 2015, is structured around long-form interviews with executives about corporate power and decision-making. The show won a Signal Award Gold for Technology in 2024. On the 8th of February 2024, Patel announced Decoder would move to two episodes per week. David Pierce launched Version History on the 5th of October 2025. The show describes itself as documentary-style, focused on the stories behind notable technology products. Its third season closed on the 12th of April 2026, with an episode about the AT&T Western Electric 500 telephone.

• 6. Redesigns and Reader Revenue

  ›

  On the 1st of November 2016, five years after its launch, The Verge rolled out a full visual redesign with a new logo built around a modified Penrose triangle, a shape that is geometrically impossible to construct in three dimensions. The site simultaneously launched version 3.0 of its publishing platform. That same month, the publication ended its relationship with deputy editor Chris Ziegler. In September 2016, The Verge learned that Ziegler had been working for Apple since July, and he was dismissed.

  The publication underwent another redesign in September 2022, moving to a sharper logo, more colorful visual design, and updated typefaces. The new homepage resembled a news feed rather than a traditional front page, pulling in posts from social media and coverage from other outlets alongside The Verge's own reporting. The redesign was intended, in part, to reduce the publication's reliance on aggregation.

  In December 2024, The Verge introduced a subscription tier, placing some articles behind a paywall. Patel wrote in a public blog post that the subscription would start at $7 per month or $50 per year. The content behind the paywall includes premium reports, newsletters, and reviews, along with fewer advertisements. Patel framed the move as necessary for the site's survival in a market that had become increasingly hostile to the kind of independent journalism The Verge was trying to practice. The publication had also switched its underlying publishing platform by that point, migrating from Chorus, the proprietary Vox Media system it had used since launch, to WordPress on the 28th of January 2025.