The Vergecast has gone through many changes over the past 10 years — different studios, different platforms, different crews — but I am always surprised to see how many fans of the show have been around since the beginning.
At every live event we’ve done — most recently at On The Verge in October — I’ve seen lines of people waiting to see the show in person, crowds around our hosts, and chuckles at inside jokes that haven’t been mentioned on the show in years. It’s still very wild to see, even after working on the show for almost six years.
When I started at The Verge as a podcast producer, we were at the tail end of our run of the live video version of The Vergecast, which we produced every week on YouTube before tossing the audio from that into the podcast feed. It’s funny that we still get requests to bring back the video version of the show — most recently at On The Verge. Nilay answered a question about this onstage at the event.
We are very convinced that editing our show makes us sound smarter. When we turned off the video feed, our downloads went way up. People like our show when we aren’t being idiots on video. We’re very good at video, I’m just pretty convinced I have a face for radio, so I’m just going to stick with that.
Listeners have also supported us experimenting with a lot of fun things in the podcast feed over the years, for which we are very grateful. From independent series like Pirate Radio, Better Worlds, our recent AI series, to a whole interview show that spun off into its own feed, our fans have been patient with us trying new things and sharing feedback on what they liked best. One of my favorites was when we made a one-off show in 2016 called 1,000 Words, which a listener said was “easily the weirdest thing that you guys have done in the last 2 years.” We have more weird stuff coming, so stay tuned.
But the live shows are where we see the instant feedback, and there is no experience quite the same to us. Hearing fans shout “Cut through the night” or just “RCS,” or seeing Vergecast Live T-shirts that we only made once really reinvigorates us each time and gets us excited to make more shows for you.
So thank you to every one of you who has listened to and watched The Vergecast over the past 10 years and over 500 episodes (I’ve lost count, but this week we’ll have our 474th Friday show), we literally could not have done it without you.
We will do more live shows in the future, so we hope to see you in person again. In the meantime, here’s a recording of our Vergecast Live at On The Verge for you to enjoy.
