We’re one year into the experiment of running The Verge with subscriptions, and so far things are going quite well — but we’ve heard a lot of feedback so far, and we’ve got some exciting changes in store to try and make this thing even better. We hit our subscriber goals for 2025, and an astonishing 85 percent of you are choosing annual plans, which is the sort of durable, long-term relationship we can count on as we hire more reporters, get in more trouble, and pay for David’s podcasting greenscreen. (Just kidding, that’s his real house. We think.)
We’ve spent a lot of time this year trying to iterate on our subscription and make it more valuable. We launched with full-site access, a lighter ad experience, two subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and RSS feeds. Since then, we’ve added the top-requested new feature with ad-free podcasts, added commenting badges for subscribers, and started testing subscriber AMAs. We’ve also expanded our subscriber-exclusive newsletter offering with Optimizer, The Stepback, Regulator, and Installer, which are all essential reading.
We’ve also been able to hire more incredible reporters and editors: Hayden Field, Tina Nguyen, John Higgins, Dominic Preston, Terrence O’Brien, Stevie Bonifield, Marina Galperina, and Todd Haselton all joined our team this year, delivering in-depth reporting, rigorous analysis, up-to-the-minute news, and the occasional shitpost that overperforms everything else on the site. (We are still The Verge, after all.)
As always, the main thing you’re buying when you subscribe to The Verge is our industry-leading ethics policy, which means we don’t let the companies we cover influence our coverage, buy fake reviews, or otherwise interfere in our newsroom. This kind of editorial independence from the pressure of needing brand deals is the heart of what we do here and increasingly rare in our polluted media ecosystem. We’re hugely appreciative of the huge number of people who’ve told us how much they value our ethics policy and have chosen to subscribe.
(An equally huge number of you are simply paying for ad-free podcasts and full-text RSS — and rest assured, we love you too.)
We’ve also heard a lot of feedback about our mix of free and paid stories, and when the paywall appears. So we’re going to beef up our free product to make things more obvious and make it more valuable to visit our homepage every day, even if you’re not a subscriber. The storystream news feed with follow features will remain free, as will our free daily newsletter. And now we’re adding a new homepage module featuring three great stories to read for free every day. The rest of our work on the site will still have a metered paywall, so at some point, you’ll have to subscribe if you read a lot. But our goal is for the homepage to be a great free utility for everyone, not just a collection of paywalled stories. We have a lot — a lot — of ideas about this, and we will be making many more changes to how the homepage and the site work next year to try and pull this off.
In fact, based on how all this is going, we’re planning to be more aggressive than ever in 2026: more journalism, more podcasts — more Verge. It’s going to be wild. I’m beyond thankful to everyone who’s subscribed this past year, and grateful for everyone who just reads and shares what we do here every day.
The Verge is going to turn 15 years old in 2026, and it’s remarkable that our strange little website about cellphones is still going, and still finding an audience of weirdos who come and hang out with us every single day. I say it a lot, but we’ve made it this far because we’ve never chased metrics, we’ve never taken money to say what other people want us to say, and we’ve never shied away from caring deeply about technology and how it makes people feel.
I hope you can support us, and if you can’t right now, we’ll work hard to still be a community for you and earn your support in the future.
