Verge

The Culling: The Verge

Yep, it happened.

Yesterday I went to the Verge homepage, but never clicked on anything. I appear to have not looked at any articles in the last few days, judging from my browser history. This makes sense, because I’ve de-prioritized the site since it added an “optional” subscription.

Today I clicked on the lead article and got this:

Yes, a paywall on the feature article, which was–hold onto your hats–about rearranging your home screen app icons. I did not get a Verge subscription, nor did I try any trickery to allow me to read the article. Instead, I closed the tab, removed the Verge from my new tab page list of bookmarks and will rarely check the site in the future.

I don’t begrudge the Verge wanting to extract money from its readers–you gotta cover expenses! But the way they are doing it sucks, and I’m not going to reward them (apart from the volume of clickbait junk opinion pieces is still too high, as well) with my money.

A partial/ambiguous paywall is bad design. It just is. I’ve barely looked at the site in the past week, so I don’t know if I’m getting hit by the paywall at random, if I reached my limit of “free” articles, or the feature article is paywalled by design. The pop-up doesn’t say, and I’m not going to dig around on my own to find out.

Asking people to fork over money and still serving them ads is also bad design. And tacky.

I don’t care about the newsletters. It’s not an enticement.

In a time when subscription fatigue is a real thing, the Verge has taken probably the second-worst approach to adding one (the worst would just be a complete paywall. I wonder if they’d still have ads then? Maybe!)

I don’t know how their two markets compare, but the way Ars Technica does subscriptions feels right to me:

  • If you don’t subscribe, the site is plastered with ads. Gotta pay the bills!
  • If you subscribe, you get some perks:
    • Article PDFs to download
    • A better layout for articles and the site in general
    • Customization options for text size, width and additional themes
    • No ads

Notice the last one? You get an ad-free experience and, knowing it is ad-free, subscribers get a layout that flows nicely without having to accommodate ads.

No content is locked behind a paywall. The sub is reasonable–as low as $25 per year. I like supporting the site this way and I get a nicer experience (to be clear, I do subscribe to Ars Technica).

Anyway, I suspect the Verge will do fine, since subs or not, they are still running ads. I’ll miss some of their content (but not their awful comments system). Having culled the site, I now have a tiny bit more time to devote to cat pics, so in a way, it’s win-win for me.

The Verge subscription is now live

It’s $7 per month or $50 per year. That’s in US dollars, so add a healthy 35% more for Canadians.

The main site will be “freemium” now, with some stuff behind a paywall and some not. You can read all the details here: Here we go, The Verge now has a subscription

As noted before, I find The Verge wildly inconsistent, so they won’t get my money. But here’s another reason:

I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief

I mean, on the one hand, I admire that Nilay Patel could seriously write “vastly improved ad experience” and “high-quality ads” without his keyboard exploding, but here’s the thing: If I am paying you, the number of ads I want is zero. None! It’s how Ars Technica does it. They also don’t mention if paying gets you a track-free experience.

We’ll see how it goes.

UPDATE: Nilay Patel has a warning for people using adblock:

Would I pay for The Verge?

The answer follows Betteridge’s law of headlines1In case you don’t click the link, the answer is no..

Article here (kudos for the shameless wordplay): On The Verge of a Paywall

Bonus irony points for this appearing in the link above:

Why would I not pay? It comes down to how I am visiting the site less these days, and the reason for that is a general steering toward clickbait-style content, opinion pieces of dubious value, and an increasing lack of awareness in the people reporting on tech and what is happening. There is also a distinct lack of a critical eye on companies that have long passed the point of getting the proverbial free pass.

EDIT to add more: The redesign they did a while back, just before Dieter Bohn left to join Google, was a horrible mess. Purple text. PURPLE TEXT. It’s still a mess, really, and it has one mode (on the front page)–dark. Too bad if that’s hard on your eyes, it’s hip. They also love embedding X stories and Instagram (which shows nothing if you are not logged into your Instagram account–you have one, right?) And they also repeat stories multiple times on the front page, which feels like hitting the reader on the head repeatedly with a Nerf hammer. Gentle, but annoying.

Plus, I’ve been engaged in The Culling for a few years now, and having one less site to read would be no big thing. Sorry, Verge!

But to be fair, The Verge does have good writing, as well, and they’ve occasionally experimented with the design of some stories in ways a site like Ars Technica (see below) never has. That’s good! It’s just not enough, overall.

EDIT, Part 2: I wanted to add that I am willing to pay for sites. I have subscribed to Ars Technica for several years now–they remove ads for paid subs, but even better, the design takes advantage of the ad-free space and everything flows better, even compared to using an ad blocker. But mainly, I support the site because they produce lots of articles I enjoy, the discussion is good (and the comments system isn’t atrocious, unlike The Verge’s).

Googled, The Verge Edition

No, I have not Googled

Google may have a monopoly on search engines, but that doesn’t mean writers at major tech websites should be greasing the way for Google by using “Googled” as a synonym for “searched”. This is the kind of thing that used to give Xerox fits when people said they “Xeroxed” something instead of “photocopying” because if Xerox didn’t fight back against the use of its name as a verb (or noun), it could eventually be declared generic and fall into the public domain.

On the other hand, Google probably doesn’t care because they are a mega-company and don’t fear consequences over things like trademarks or copyright. They know they’re in no danger of “Google” becoming a generic term, and actually like it when people say “Googled” because it further cements “search” as being synonymous with Google.

And this is why writers should do better than to help Google along. Other search engines exist (I use DuckDuckGo and Kaigi) and it’s presumptuous to assume everyone uses Google.

(BTW, the editorial is otherwise well-stated and worth checking out!)