The Verge Launches an Ambitious New Site

Today, The Verge’s co-founder and editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and publisher Helen Havlak unveiled an ambitious new site and design for the 10-year-old technology brand. The Verge is a destination that has sustained a loyal and robust community since its founding, and with its new site, the brand will build for the next 10 years by investing in a direct relationship with its audience. Building on a homepage that’s one of the most-visited daily destinations in technology coverage, The Verge’s new homepage will introduce the Storystream news feed, a new Twitter-like feature that will offer readers a comprehensive, curated rundown of the most important tech stories of the day — featuring expert commentary by Verge journalists; links to the best reporting on The Verge and other sites; and direct embeds from TikTok, Reddit, and more. It will also introduce a new logo and design  — every page will be more reader-friendly, faster, and more modern, from basic article pages and art to photography-heavy product reviews and Pulitzer-nominated investigative reporting. It is the first Vox Media site to run on Duet, a new mobile-first audience platform that will level up Vox Media’s stack with the most modern web technology available today. 

“The Verge is almost 11 years old now, and when we set out to redesign it, we realized we had the opportunity to completely rethink the experience of a news site — bringing the best of old-school blogging to a modern news feed experience,” says Patel. “We think the new Verge will be more vital, more interesting, more useful, and most importantly, more fun for a huge audience.” 

The new site comes on the heels of a year of expansion for the multiplatform editorial brand, which turned 10 last November and has deepened its footprint in video, audio, commerce, and more. In the last year alone, The Verge, whose video content has a following of 12.6 million across platforms, launched its own OTT app and debuted its very first streaming series for Netflix, The Future Of, which explored the possibilities of the future of tech. The brand also made its first foray into paid products with the acquisition of the podcast industry newsletter Hot Pod, ramped up its investment in audio by bringing on its first editorial director for audio to develop new and existing shows including The Vergecast and Decoder, expanded its reviews and commerce teams, and launched its first major live event. 

“The Verge’s greatest asset is the loyal audience who comes to our website every day, and we think they are going to love the Storystream news feed,” says Havlak. “And we won’t stop there — we will continue to ship new site features and new products as we embark on the next 10 years of The Verge.”

The site launches with a short documentary and essay about Elon Musk’s moonshot “Starbase.” As Patel writes in his editor’s letter introducing the new site, “The Verge should be fun to read every time you open it. If we get that right, everything else will fall into place. We are among the luckiest people in media because we have the audience that we do, and what we want more than anything is for that audience — for you — to feel how much we care. That’s been the secret to our success for nearly 11 years now: we care, very much, and it’s fun to care about something as much as we care about The Verge and our audience.”

The Verge is an ambitious multimedia effort founded in 2011 to examine how technology will change life in the future for a massive mainstream audience. Our original editorial insight was that technology had migrated from the far fringes of the culture to the absolute center as mobile technology created a new generation of digital consumers. Now, we live in a dazzling world of screens that has ushered in revolutions in media, transportation, and science. The future is arriving faster than ever, and The Verge brings you what’s next.