The Verge switches up its audience team to prepare for Google Zero

The Verge is rethinking what it means to grow an audience in the post-search era.

After years of prioritizing SEO, content distribution, virality and referral traffic, the Vox Media-owned tech publisher has reorganized its audience team around turning casual site visitors into loyal, direct readers.

Over the past two years, The Verge has moved away from generalist audience development roles in favor of specialists focused on areas like newsletters, platform engagement and audience analytics.

“As we saw the landscape change, and as we really continued to invest in increasing the user value and investing in our homepage and direct audience, we did change how the audience team was structured quite a bit,” Esther Cohen, director of audience and subscriptions at The Verge, said onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit last month. “Rather than having a bunch of content strategists or social media managers doing a little bit of everything, we now have a bunch of specialists.”

The focus for the audience team now is to understand where the high-value audiences are, how to acquire them and how to offer them the content they want on different platforms, Cohen said.

For example, a newsletter specialist is dedicated to top-of-funnel acquisition and moving readers down the funnel via email. Two other specialists are focused on platform and community engagement. And a newsroom analyst works closely with the editorial team to dig into what content and headlines are resonating with audiences, and analyze what The Verge’s anonymous users, registered users and subscribers are consuming, Cohen said.

As Digiday previously reported, The Verge is one of many publishers overhauling their newsrooms in response to the changing search and AI environment, as publishers work to deepen audience relationships and reduce reliance on referral traffic-centric models.

Monica Richardson, svp at USA Today, announced in September that the company was forming a new audience and digital production team to better cater to the changing search environment. The new structure (and new role of an executive editor of audience and digital production) focuses on centralized production, audience growth within key coverage areas and off-platform distribution.

Typically, when companies announce reorgs, it tends to result in layoffs. But unlike USA Today’s internal staffing changes, which have come with layoffs, The Verge’s audience team has expanded over the past two years, Cohen said. She declined to share how many people are on the team now, or how much it’s grown.

The Verge giving dedicated attention to specific areas of audience development – from email marketing to social analytics – makes sense at a time when publishers are grappling with declining search traffic and shifting their focus as a result, said Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development and marketing firm Twenty-First Digital.

“I think it’s smart to do this now, especially as publishers work to replace search traffic,” Chowning said. “Much of this feels necessary because the goals are changing. Historically, audience teams were charged with reach and page views. Now the job is focused on turning those visitors into people with a direct relationship to the publisher, through newsletters, memberships, and subscriptions. That effort requires deeper expertise in each channel and funnel stage.”

Instead of measuring the success of these audience strategies primarily by page views, each audience team member now has their own growth targets, which Cohen said has been “super empowering” for the team.

The Verge is tailoring its audience strategy to three segments: anonymous visitors, registered users and paying subscribers. In practice, that means finding tactics that encourage repeat visits through its homepage to drive registrations with personalized feeds and community features, and retain subscribers through exclusive content and perks. The goal is to give readers at every stage of the funnel a reason to return, rather than chasing scale, Cohen said.

And it seems to be working so far: more than half of The Verge’s subscriber acquisition comes from readers going straight to the publisher’s subscription sign-up page, Cohen added. She declined to share how many subscribers The Verge has, or how much revenue this business is driving. The Verge first introduced its subscription and metered, dynamic paywall in December 2024.

The Verge is also experimenting with other ways to distribute its content that aren’t reliant on search, such as paid media and performance marketing, Cohen said. However, she declined to share how much is going into this and said she is proceeding with caution.

“If user value and longevity is what you’re after, then high spending performance marketing is maybe not going to give you that user in the way that other things can. So being thoughtful about your budget and how you’re spending that money and what the ROI on investment is there, I think is really important,” Cohen said.

The Verge is also doing “a ton” of traditional organic social marketing, such as ads on its site and podcasts, and pitching coverage to larger outlets.

“I have my little audience team pitching to bigger news outlets, when we have a scoop or an exclusive. We are really thinking about how to get The Verge out there in ways that are not obvious,” Cohen said.

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