Websites are back: inside The Verge's redesign

David Pierce and Nilay Patel discuss the ideas behind The Verge's brand new redesigned website, which officially launched on September 13th. David also chats with senior product manager Tara Kalmanson and senior engineer Matt Crider, who worked on the redesign, about what went into implementing those ideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Sarah Fons. I'm your friend David Pierce and it is currently 5:51 in the morning on Tuesday, September 13th, which means that A, I have to be quiet because no one else is awake yet, and B, it means we're about nine minutes away from the launch of the new verge.com. We've been working on this for two years. It's a redesign. We have a new logo. It's a totally new way of thinking about how The Verge actually works. And so that's actually what this episode is going to be about. We spent two years on this, like I said, and it made us think some pretty philosophical thoughts about how the internet works and how platforms work and what it means to just be a person on the internet now. I will warn you, this episode is very navel-gazy. We talk a lot about The Verge and a lot about

• 0:48David Pierce?

  our feelings about The Verge, but I think it's really interesting and it was cool to go through the same kind of stuff that a lot of the companies we cover are going through all the time. So we're going to get to all of that in just a second, but first, I'm going to go refresh our website about 300 times because I can't wait to see it. See you in a sec.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:41David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So before we get into the show, just a quick heads up. Next week, we're going to be answering all of your questions about Apple's new stuff. All the new phones, new watches, new software, anything you want to know. All you have to do is call into the Verge hotline, which is 866-VERGE11, and ask us any of your most burning questions. The weirder, the better. And we will do as many as we can on the show next week. Okay, let's get into it. As I mentioned, today, we're going to focus on websites, mostly one that we made and have spent the last two years making. The new Verge just launched. It's new and exciting. And in the process of launching this, I learned a surprising amount about how web caches work. Turns out they're very complicated. I just came back to the Verge in April,

• 3:25David Pierce?

  when the new website was already deep in progress. So I wanted to know where it started, where it came from, and why it felt like this was the future of the Verge. So I grabbed, who else, Neelai Patel, to talk about it. He's been thinking about this forever. He's been literally like running around Vox Media talking about revolutionizing the media with blog posts. And over the course of his career and the Verge, we've seen the future of the internet seem like it's changed 100 times. So we have a lot to talk about here, especially as we look at the next decade. Let's get into it.

• 4:01David Pierce?

  Neelai, hello.

• 4:02Nilay Patel?

  Hey, man. How's it going?

• 4:03David Pierce?

  We have a new website.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  We have a new website. It is two years in the making. I could not be more excited about it.

• 4:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, so I want to talk about like what it is and all the implications and the like taglines you've been using obsessively for like as long as I've been here. But this redesign predates me. So I think like I want to know the story and I think people will too, because it's an interesting story. Like, start at the beginning. How do we decide to redesign theverge.com?

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, first, I just want to point out that I recruited you back to The Verge by showing you the redesign and you quit your job the next day and came to work here.

• 4:31David Pierce?

  That is precisely correct, yes.

• 4:33Nilay Patel?

  Which is very good. And that's how I knew it was going to work. So redesign, it's very simple, actually. Our last redesign was six years ago, five years ago. And we did that redesign for what we thought was the era of what you might call distributed publishing, Google AMP and Facebook instant articles. So we tried to make this thing that could travel everywhere. And we put a lot of our emphasis into elements that would say The Verge or feel like The Verge, no matter where they were. So that's where you got like bright pink pull quotes. That's where you got a lot of our photo styles.

• 5:05David Pierce?

  So you're saying like, how do we let people share screenshots or videos and like have it still be The Verge? Like, how do we look like The Verge even when you're not on theverge.com?

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that was really the prevailing wisdom in media back then.

• 5:18David Pierce?

  Websites were dying.

• 5:19Nilay Patel?

  That websites were dying and that Facebook instant articles take over the media. There was a lot of writing about it, which I won't go into, but there was just, that was the conventional wisdom of the industry was that the platforms would suck all media into them and we would never open Safari again. And we would just read everything in Apple News. And to some extent, that happened. Like, it really happened to a lot of publishers. I just think that era is kind of over in one way. If you just look at our traffic, like Facebook instant articles doesn't exist anymore. Apple News is big, but like we can't feel it. A lot of our stories like hit huge in Apple News, but we just like don't see it. We don't feel it. Like, we don't have a community there.

• 5:55David Pierce?

  I think of Apple News as like the print newspaper of 2022, where it's like, I know it's there and I know people consume it. I just don't know anything about what happens there. It's just like a magical other place where people read news.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think the most important piece is there's no feedback loop from that platform in particular. People read it, they can't talk to you. And then you just look at the other broader trends. Where do people talk to us? Like, I think the Vergecast is a really important part of The Verge. It's what we started with.

• 6:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  I think old time listeners will know this. We started the whole site with a podcast. It was called This Is My Next Podcast, because we had left Engadget, we needed a new podcast, and that was the name. Then the site was called This Is My Next, and the first thing we launched with The Verge was The Vergecast. So we knew that our success was built on a community of our readers and our listeners. And I just was thinking really hard, like, how do I get that back, instead of giving it to Twitter, or giving it to YouTube, or giving it to Reddit, or Twitch, or Discord, or all the other things people are doing, which are smart and good, but we happen to have a gigantic website. So we should probably build our own platform in some way.

• 7:01David Pierce?

  One of the things I think is really interesting about this moment of time that we're in is like, a lot of people are looking at that exact same thing you just described, and saying, oh, the thing I need to do is lean deeper into those platforms, to say, like, this is where this is happening. Like, what I actually need to do is start a Discord and try to get people in there, or like, become a redditor. Like, you see, the Washington Post's strategy is like, how do we build full communities in all of these places, right? And I think it's very interesting to me that you and the team looked at this and said, like, okay, how do we pull some of this back towards us, rather than falling into those holes again?

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  For sure. And I think those strategies are actually smart. It's not that we're not going to do it, you know? We've started publishing the show as a series of TikToks, right? Like, we know that there's audience on those platforms, you have to go to those audiences. I just think the big move is, where are you going to bring those audiences back to? Where are they going to find you first? And I, we have an asset at The Verge that we really haven't taken advantage of in some time, which is our homepage. Our homepage is the single most popular page at Vox Media. The most popular webpage at Vox Media on any given day is The Verge homepage. So a lot of this was, how do I make that page really, really valuable for more people? And then what we coupled that with was Dieter and I were routinely frustrated that we weren't on our own homepage enough.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  We were both busy. We were running the site. We were making podcasts. We were off shooting videos. And so when the barrier to entry to our own homepage was a 500 word article about something we had seen, it was too high. Like, we weren't publishing enough and we were driving ourselves crazy. And we found ourselves using Twitter, which is someone else's platform.

• 8:33David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  And a good platform. Lots of people use Twitter. They build great communities around themselves. But if you look at what they tend to do with those communities, they convert them to something else that makes them money. And we were like, not doing a great job of that.

• 8:45David Pierce?

  Or they just let them languish and nothing ever happens to them. It's generally Twitter's move.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, I think a lot of the Substack writers, right? Their audience is on Twitter and they convert them into paying Substack customers. I think that's great. I have no beef with that whatsoever. I just, I'm looking at the gigantic website we run and saying, why am I finding it easier to publish on someone else's platform instead of my own? I'm the boss. That's a weird outcome, right? But then it's like you get into what, what a 500 word article or a thousand word article or 10,000 word review means to people. And you have to deliver the quality bar. So if I was like, I'm just excusing myself from the publishing process or our standards or whatever. So I can just yellow out things that look like tweets in our article page. One, I think the staff would mutiny. I think I would very quickly stop being the boss.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  I think that's just the end of that. And two, I think we would do a disservice to our audience, right? We would, we would be sending them the signal of what a product looked like, a journalism product looked like, but then not actually over delivering on the product, which is what you want to do. So we just started having, but Dieter and I were talking about this for a long time. And we came up with a phrase, which actually I think is too reductive for what our new site is. But we just want to be able to tweet onto our own website, right? That was like the first thing we said to our designers. And what had happened was Vox Media had just merged with New York Magazine. So we got all these new designers onto our design team that were the great New York Magazine designers. And so we had our existing great design team that we loved. We had these new New York. Designers and we just got to think from a clean sheet. What on earth does tweet onto the website mean?

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  And our first prototype, Dieter and I made it in the same live blog tool that we use for Apple events. Right? We just weren't like, we're not going to think about our technology product. We're just going to blog the news for ourselves for a day and just see what it feels like. Even that was too much. So we made another prototype in Google Docs. So we weren't thinking about other people's software at all. And we were just kind of like figuring it out and we gave those prototypes over. And we ended up with our site where we kind of solved a bunch of problems at once. Like, how do most people experience the news? In a newsfeed? So our site should just look like a newsfeed. How do we make it easier for our reporters to talk to the audience? Well, you give them the tool they're already used to using to do that, which is something that looks like posting to a newsfeed, like a Twitter or Facebook.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  And then how do you re-promote our own stories without just doing the boring thing that we do now, which is like pin them to the top? You let us write about them like human beings. And then you get to, we turn the next corner, which was, oh, we should be able to embed anything from anywhere. So there's a cool TikTok. We don't have to write a whole article about it. We can literally just say, here's a cool TikTok. It turns out our video team makes a lot of cool TikToks and they had no access to our own homepage. So now our video team has access to our homepage in something that looks exactly like a newsfeed. It's familiar. We don't have to teach anybody how to use it. And you just keep stacking it up. And then you get to me saying, I'm going to revolutionize the media with blog posts, which I think we're going to do.

• 11:38David Pierce?

  Part of me has wondered through this whole process, if the thing that we're doing is just reinventing the internet circa like 2004. Back when everybody's theory was like, I'm going to have my own site and I'm going to have a blog role. And we're all going to come to each other's websites and you know, you're going to sit on my homepage and refresh it 100 times a day. And there's like a, there's a subset of people who I think like really miss those days. And that was like when RSS readers were big and that was great. And then there's a subset of people who are like, you know, actually Twitter and Facebook are like pretty successful platforms at showing me stuff that I'm interested in and care about. And I think, I don't know, I'm torn between those two worlds. Like I got started in this world at like the middle of that transition between like the blogging world and the like digital news world.

• 12:23David Pierce?

  I don't know. Is it like, is this just you wishing it was 2005 again? And you were just like writing a million posts a day?

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  A little bit. I can't, I can't say no. You know, I got my start in all this when I was sitting in law school and I would refresh the Engadget homepage 100 times a day. And I quickly realized like, I should get an RSS reader. And then I'd refresh the RSS reader 100 times a day. And I remember my friends and I used to say, we've run out of the internet. We have to like, start paying attention in class, because we had like, read all the blog posts that day.

• 12:51David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:52Nilay Patel?

  And that feeling was actually like, fine. Like, looking back on it, that feeling was fine. And now we live in this like, world of infinity, right? And I think a lot of people would like the internet to come to an end every day. So yeah, there's a part of it that's just, what I want to feel like, is that our site is a conversation that's ongoing. And you can come, join it. And it does not have the toxicity of a Twitter associated with it. It does not have the chaos of a Facebook newsfeed associated with it. It's where we are. And just like, I think the Vergecast audience feels about our show, our site should feel like you're hanging out with us. It just so happens that we are really excellent journalists who are smart and know what we're talking about. But like, the way it should feel is that it's a community, right? And that, I think, is missing from

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  so many places on the internet.

• 13:39David Pierce?

  I think that's right. And I think the thing to me that really jumped out, like, when you first showed me, I think it was just a bunch of like, Figma pages, that you were just like, look, here's, here's some things. It was like, to me, the internet is so uncurated now, in really crappy, unpleasant ways, where like, I go, I was thinking about this the other day, like, when you have five minutes to kill, where do you go? Right? And I like, I go to Twitter and it makes me angry, or I go to TikTok, and then it's been like, 50 minutes, and I'm still in the bathroom, and that's awkward. And I say, that's not any good. Like, Instagram is just the same thing now. YouTube, all the videos are too long. I don't know. So it's like, there just isn't like, a place to go and find stuff that I'm interested in. And even news websites, like, there's tons of them, lots of them are very good, but they all just like, have their own stuff and pretends like the rest of the

• 14:22David Pierce?

  world doesn't exist. And one thing I've always liked about The Verge, is that it like, acknowledges that the internet is a large place full of people who don't work at The Verge, and that sometimes they do interesting things. And that's all well and good, but I feel like the cool thing about the thing that we're trying to do is like, we're just gonna tell you about all the stuff you should know about. And not in like, a business-y, sound smart in your first Meeting way, but like, uh, the internet's like a cool, interesting place and we're good at finding it because we do it for a living. And there's just not a lot of that. Like, I used to spend a lot of time on long form and like old dig. And Reddit is still very good at this, but there's just like not that many places where I'm just like, I have five minutes to kill. Show me some cool stuff from people I like and trust. And that's like, I wish more of the internet felt like that.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I do think there's an element of that that was that old blogging experience.

• 15:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  I'll give great credit to our friend, John Gruber, Daring Fireball. Daring Fireball is that still. He has built an entire career doing that. Certainly there's some inspiration from that in our site. But I think there's also just another turn of it, which is you've got to actually reconceptualize that into the product that people are familiar with, which is a newsfeed. There's a little bit of the old blog ideas in there, but we didn't inherit all of them, right? This isn't Engadget from 2006 or whatever, where we used to say like, read more after the jump. Like, there's a whole set of moves we could glue back on to this product. But really, I think the audience now is just like used to newsfeed. So we actually made it more like a newsfeed. And more like, hey, we're just pointing you at other stuff instead of, hey, there's more here.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  And one of my biggest goals, like one of our, the big number that I'm looking at is how much traffic we send out. I think we will be a huge success if we are sending a meaningful amount of traffic to other people, right? And they can see it and we can see it. Cause that relationship between publishers and platforms has gotten totally out of whack. Most publishers get their traffic from Google and their newsrooms are paying attention to Twitter, which actually sends nobody any traffic. We can very quickly send a lot of people more traffic than Twitter, I think. So if we can just get back in the game where we're like, hey, you can build your own communities on your own platforms. Once again, in a format that feels Both very modern because it's a newsfeed, but inherits the best parts of what people

• 16:37Nilay Patel?

  loved about blogging and you're like a good citizen of the internet because you're sharing the wealth. I think that lets you kind of reset that whole relationship a little bit and then potentially build whatever the next things are without constantly scrambling against whatever algorithm update, whatever platform is going to roll out to up or down rank, whatever content.

• 16:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, okay. So I want to come back to Google because you have mad spicy takes about Google that we're going to get to in a second. But I think the community aspect of this is, I suspect, going to be a thing a lot of people like press against and try to figure out, especially because like the first version of the feed that we have doesn't have comments. And it's, it's a thing I know you've been thinking about for a long time. And like, are we going to have like retweets, but they're called like re-verges and something happens there? And you can like super verge something for $9.99 a month. And like, I don't know, do we end up like algorithmically personalizing these newsfeed, right? There's just like, when you call something a newsfeed, there's this like long road you can trip down into good, but also like deeply weird stuff. And then like three years from now, the verge is just like vertical scrolling video on the homepage. And that's all that

• 17:42David Pierce?

  we are. This is how it goes. Like we've seen this over and over and over.

• 17:45Nilay Patel?

  Here are all of David's fears. I would like to get to the point where the verge is responsible for the outcome of American democracy. I think we'd be excellent stewards of it. Just to be honest, like we, if we have a goal, that's it.

• 17:55David Pierce?

  I'll take that on. I'm ready for it.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  You know, I don't know what we're going to do next. The reason we don't, we want to have comments. The reason we don't have comments now is because we are very good at covering platforms and content moderation. And we should have a plan for how to grow a healthy community before we just light up comments on 100 more posts today.

• 18:12David Pierce?

  We've written the like, what if they had thought about this ahead of time story enough that we should probably think about it ahead of time?

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I want to flip it on and see if it works. I want, you know, I think the best place to be is for other people to tell us what things they think are obvious, right? Here's this product and here's what we think is the obvious next step for you. And then you deliver the thing that's obvious to a lot of people and that makes them happy, right? And like, I think there's a relationship with our community there where we want to build that thing together. Just like, again, I think there's a, the success of the verge in one tiny way is that the verge cast audience is a community, right? And that community, for better or worse, wants us to take interesting shots at how to cover tech. And so we can take some risks that maybe a more traditional brand like the times or whatever can't take. I think we can do that with our website, too.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  I just want, I just want to make sure that, you know, we have enough moderators or they're sufficiently prepared for the influx of new content. Or we have a new commenting platform. It's called Coral, which is very cool. It's part of Vox Media, but it's powers comments on all kinds of sites all over the world. I want to make sure people are initiated into Coral the correct way. And they're, they know how to use the tool and it feels empowering. I can see us getting to a place where in our newsfeed, we might have top commenters. We might be able to promote comments into the newsfeed and say, here's a great comment from a story. You can see all the things we might be able to do. I think we just have to be very judicious at how we grow that and how we do it step by step. Because if we get it wrong, like we know what happens. We're really good at covering that story.

• 19:49David Pierce?

  Well, and I think to me, honestly, the commenting side of this is one of the things that's going to be most interesting to watch because like, again, to, you know, rewind a generation of internet media, don't read the comments just became like a truism of anyone who writes online, right? Like the comments was either a thing you got rid of or just like a cesspool where people were horrible that you were trained to ignore and that no good came of reading the comments. And then eventually everybody sort of outsourced the comments to Twitter and that has its own messy problems.

• 20:16Nilay Patel?

  And then they all got addicted to reading Twitter. It's like, it's a weird cycle that happened there.

• 20:21David Pierce?

  So I guess like the, the thing that I'm curious about is to see like the, obviously the content moderation thing is crucial. And as we've seen over and over, anyone who does that at any size beyond like six people, it's a lot of work and it's hard to get right. But can we start to solve some of this stuff with product? Like as a person on the internet, I think it's fascinating, but especially like to get to watch it within the place that I work is going to be really, really interesting.

• 20:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, people can go check out Coral. It's a product you can just use. It's there for you. That team is amazing. They have lots of ideas on how product might build healthier communities.

• 20:53David Pierce?

  The team at SB Nation, we should say, with all the team blogs, they use the hell out of Coral and do some really interesting stuff.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that all just runs on coral. Polygon uses coral for its comments. Like lots and lots of sites outside of Vox me use coral. Coral is a product, right? It's a product that you can go sign up for and use on your site. So, you know, that team has a lot of ideas. I think we have a lot of ideas. I've said content moderation and you said content moderation. Now, the game here is not we're going to have a bunch of keywords that are bad and then delete the comments. The game actually is how do you build a community? How do you make that space worthwhile? And the reason most publishers were like, don't read the comments, whatever, we'll just turn them off. Because you have to invest a lot into it to make that good. And it turns out, just the math of every publisher is that people who comment are the tiniest fraction of your audience. So you're pointing the most dollars at like the smallest segment of the audience.

• 21:43David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:43Nilay Patel?

  I think that's actually still valuable to do because hopefully that section of the audience is the one that loves you the most. So I think we just need, we need a good plan for how we're going to grow these communities and how we're going to make it valuable. I will tell you right now, I know that the women on our staff, the people of color on our staff, the non-binary folks on our staff, social media is not great for them.

• 22:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Nilay Patel?

  You know, like we launched with a big feature on Starbase and you should read it. Lauren Gresh wrote it for us before she went off to Bloomberg. And just like in the middle, she's like, being a woman covering Starbase means people on the internet call me a bitch a lot. Just a fact for her in her life. Well, I think our community should have a higher standard than that. And so our writers, the reason you don't pay attention to the comments is like, it's still this, it has the same dynamics of the internet on the comments of the New York Times, which is weird.

• 22:25David Pierce?

  It is weird.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  And I think we should be able to build a healthier community where you actually get a closer relationship to our writers and our writers are more incentivized to participate because it's a good place to be. That's hard, right? We had to like ship the first thing first and get to a place where people are telling us what the next obvious thing is. And then put as much thought into that and then ship that.

• 22:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I buy that. Okay, we need to take a break. And actually, you and I, Neelai, are going to take a quick pause because I want to dig into a few of the things about the state of the internet that you've been talking about. So I'm going to grab a couple of folks on our product team and dig into that. And then you and I'll pick back up in a few minutes. We'll be right back.

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• 24:22David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Like we've been talking about, building a new website in 2022 is a complicated thing. But like, I know that, but I really have no idea what that means or what it entails. And also, after weeks of testing our new site, I'm desperate to know specifically why TikTok embeds are so terrible. This just keeps coming up over and over again. So I grabbed two people on our product team who know. Matt Kreider. I'm a senior engineer working on The Verge right now. And Tara Kalmanson.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  I'm a senior product manager in charge of the Verge redesign and platform launch for the front end of the website.

• 24:58David Pierce?

  To help me figure it out.

• 25:02David Pierce?

  What is it like to develop on the web right now with all of the things that the web is and all of the things we were trying to like pull into this platform? Is the open web a good place to develop for right now? How does that feel?

• 25:14Speaker 05

  Developing on the web is complicated these days. I've been building websites since like the GeoCities days and professionally for 15 years or so. And it used to be, yeah, just a PHP server. Maybe you're running WordPress or Drupal or something. And there wasn't too much complexity, especially on the front end. Right now, so much complexity is on the front end, it's in the browser. And there's so many options for what sort of tools you use and people battling which one is the right tool to use. Do you use React or Vue or whatnot? So there's lots of opinions out there and lots of complexity in deciding what the right tool for the job is. So there's a lot. You're gonna have to keep yourself up to date all the time.

• 25:56Speaker 05

  And it's a lot of work to be on the cutting edge of what's good on the web right now. And I think our platform for The Verge is a lot of cutting edge stuff. So it's really exciting to kind of work with these new tools, but you're constantly having to learn new things.

• 26:10David Pierce?

  Give me an example, because that's actually one of the things I was gonna ask about, which is like, you guys have been doing this for a long time. And I can imagine a world in which like a bunch of new stuff crops up as you're working on it and you're like, no, no, no, we don't, we don't have time to deal with this. We've, we know what we're gonna build based on the stuff that we decided to build it with two years ago. Or I can imagine there's like a shiny object syndrome where like somebody's like loading a GitHub page, being like, look at this crazy new thing. I found every meeting that you possibly have. And Tara's laughing like I'm like maybe a little bit right on that one?

• 26:36Speaker 05

  Hundred percent right.

• 26:37David Pierce?

  Is there a right answer on that, on the spectrum between those things?

• 26:40Speaker 05

  Definitely a spectrum, because there are shiny things out there that I'm looking at like, oh, this will be really great. But there's so much risk with new technology, right?

• 26:48Speaker 04

  The beauty of websites in general is, you know, if you're a product manager working on an app or a software, you know, you release inversions and it's kind of a serious waterfall process and you cut off at some point and then all of a sudden, if a feature wasn't included, you're, it's like you're never getting it back. Whereas the web has a short memory and you can, at any given moment, kind of stare at staging and stare at production. And if staging is better than what's on production, you can choose to ship it and continue to do that every day forever, which is why it's, in my opinion at least, so much more fun than working on an app or software. And it's a little easier then to maybe hedge with your stakeholders to say like, "Okay, maybe we want to prioritize shipping faster and, you know, some of these shiny new features can come later."

• 27:30Speaker 04

  And we can test as we release them and iteratively do so, and it kind of gives us a little bit more freedom in that respect.

• 27:37David Pierce?

  What are some of the shiny things behind the scenes at The Verge for like the web dev nerds who are going to be poking around The Verge trying to figure out what's new? What are the shiniest things?

• 27:47Speaker 04

  I don't know if it's web dev nerds so much as editor nerds, but there's some new article leads and article formats that we'd love to introduce, especially in the age of podcasting. And, you know, some of our third-party tools are not as flexible as we'd like them to be to really get creative with embeds and things like that. But the way that we tell stories, I think there's a limit to how creative people want the article to be that they're reading, but at some point, we can still create something fun on a webpage.

• 28:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, is that a tricky balance? Because I was actually thinking about this the other day, because where it was like that brief moment like when Snowfall happened at The New York Times where everybody was like, "The future of news on the internet is like massive bespoke design and everything is going to feel new and weird and crazy." And that is, I would say, mercifully not where we landed, generally speaking. There's still some room for some of that, and like, we do a lot of really cool bespoke design on The Verge. But this idea that like, most people on the internet, they have like come to expect a certain thing when they come to a site like ours, and part of the job is to like deliver some of that. As you guys are building this, like, is that useful constraint? Is it annoying? Is there a tendency to just say like, "What if we blew up everything and all the text went like bottom to top just to change things because we want to?"

• 28:58Speaker 04

  I think the product and engineering answers are going to be different for this, but on the product side, it's hugely beneficial because I think most of our readers prefer a simple experience that loads really fast. And I think The Verge in particular does a great job of designing something that facilitates the storytelling and allows the page to still load fast. I think when design becomes a part of storytelling, you know, the magic happens at that intersection. But the whole trend of Google Amp and Facebook Instant and Apple News, they're not necessarily going away. They are a different form now than they were when they started, but they still rest on the same hypothesis that users want faster-loading webpages that have less JavaScript and just are a lot simpler. And Google still prioritizes or ranks better all of those sites that kind of fit that same philosophy.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  And so, it's forced us to think a lot more seriously about page speed and the trade-offs with You know, the really fancy design stuff and the animations and stuff shooting across the page, you know, that's, it's really not easy to prioritize things like that anymore.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  I think there's a time and a place for those snowfall-esque articles. I mean, The Verge does some really great ones. That was my job before I came to Box, was building those sorts of articles. But yeah, I think in general, when people want the news, they don't always want, you know, an insane interaction. They just want to read some content.

• 30:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's very fair. Terry, you just brought up speed, which is a thing I think is really interesting, that like, it does seem like you can do a lot of stuff on the web. There are sort of lots of options for how to do anything, but the like, single most important thing you have to get right is your, your website has to be fast. And if your website is not fast, users will hate you and Google will hate you and you will fail. I'm like oversimplifying it, but I think like only slightly. Is there anything else in the process that is as important as like making the website fast?

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Definitely the content. And as much as the product and engineering teams don't own that, that is like 100% more important than speed. I think the quality of the content is the most exciting thing as like on our side, to be able to build a site that has quality content is awesome. But aside from that, I think that's kind of the trifecta is content, speed, and design or usability. I feel like if we get those three things right, we're in really good shape. But users will excuse speed if the content is that good and vice versa, you know, it's not a totally lost cause if you have a slow website, but it definitely helps. And that's like one metric that we can affect. So very much our job to like make that, make that happen.

• 31:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know. Content is king and that's the most important thing for Google too. Someone knows you have good content. Maybe it's pick two, content, design, or speed. They're all important. There's certainly like, you know, great websites out there that are terribly designed. Yeah, they all kind of work in tandem, those three things.

• 31:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, the fact that Drudge Report is successful means there are a lot of ways to do this stuff correctly, I suppose.

• 31:35Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 31:37David Pierce?

  But let's talk about the sort of embed code internet, which is like how I've come to think about it. Cause part of what I think is an interesting challenge, and it comes back to kind of the building for the open web thing, is like, one of the things you all set out to do is build a site that can sort of consume and display all these other things. And like YouTube is famous for having very good embed codes and making that process very easy for people to Like bring other content onto your platform. I don't know that any other platform is like well known for being sort of famous to tap into and use this way. But we also live in a time where like everything is APIs and you can start to call APIs and sort of integrate other stuff into your own platforms. And I don't know, there's a lot of things kind of all happening simultaneously.

• 32:17David Pierce?

  Like, is it as hard as I would think to build a thing that can sort of be a responsible displayer of all of these different things all over the internet?

• 32:25Speaker 05

  It's super easy to build it. It's super hard to build it well.

• 32:30David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  There's so many platforms that provide an API or some sort of way of embedding their content into your site. And it's pretty easy to kind of to figure that out. Most of them use an open standard called oh embed, which is basically you can put in a URL and the service will respond. It's like, this is how you should embed me to your site. But once you get it in there, there's so many problems as far as performance. And then you gotta ask yourself, like, why is the service allowing their platform to be used outside of, you know, where they can make money off of it? So there's definitely some risk involved in putting in these third-party services. But just generally doing it in a performant way is pretty tricky.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  In addition to performance and speed, there's also the design question. Like, these things are really not that flexible. And so if you're trying to do something really creative, it can be really hard to help them play well. And then there's privacy concerns, which Matt was alluding to. And, you know, if these embeds are trying to track their users on other sites on the internet and dropping cookies on our site, you know, with the increasingly expansive GDPR, CCPA and privacy laws all over the world. That's just a lot of cookies to find, identify and treat properly.

• 33:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was, I was actually gonna ask about that because I do think one of the things that people are increasingly sensitive to, largely thanks to Facebook, is the idea that like wherever Facebook appears in my web browsing universe, Facebook gets data about me. And it's obviously not just true about Facebook, it's true of lots of these platforms. Have you guys thought through kind of what our job is and what it means like as the verge to be a, to handle that the correct way? What is the right answer there?

• 34:06Speaker 04

  It's a little bit binary. If the embed appears, they can track you. So users can, should, and legally should be in many places allowed to opt out. But it often means that we can't display the embed. And a lot of times that is a huge part of the storytelling or the content. So it's the user's choice, but it comes with a trade off for them, which is unfortunate. A lot of times the reporting will say something about what the tweet said, which can be hard when someone then deletes the tweet and legally we're supposed to delete a tweet. But it's pretty binary, which sucks a little bit.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  I think that's an interesting concept that is worth exploring. I mean, you can opt out of ads, like with the CCPA laws in California, you're legally supposed to be allowed to opt out of an ad. We might have to do the same thing for embeds. Because, I mean, I'm no expert on each platform and what sort of tracking they use. But the major ones like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, they inject like third party JavaScript onto your page, which can be like, they have a lot of power through that little embed window. They have the ability to do tracking if they soak shoes. So I think, yeah, it's kind of a, kind of a privacy gray area that is worth exploring more.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  As a user, you can reject ad tracking and personalized ads, but you can't necessarily reject the ability to like see an ad unless it's through an ad blocker. I don't know, it would be nice if embeds were the same.

• 35:23David Pierce?

  Well, and I think it's, it's part of what's interesting about it is like, we all had this, you know, long sort of internet wide debate about like the Facebook tracking pixel that was in everybody's site. And then there was the like, is it worth having the sign in with Google thing in exchange for, you know, the data that you're giving? And it feels like embeds in a certain way are like the most complicated version of that. Because even if I don't want access to the platform, like if there's a video I want to watch, I want to watch the video. And I sort of understand why YouTube is like, well, if you want to watch the video, you have to like engage with all the pieces of our platform. But then on the, on the flip side, like that sucks. And so I just like, where all of that is supposed to shake out and will, I think is really complicated and interesting. And is the kind of thing that is just like not put in front of users. Like, I don't know that most people think about the fact that like,

• 36:06David Pierce?

  when I see an embedded tweet on a website, like that is in a certain way, I am now engaging with Twitter, the platform. It's just a thing that is happening. And I think most people are like, just not even aware of that or sort of thinking about what that interaction actually looks like, which is really interesting.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  And you don't even have to be a Twitter user or like a Facebook user. Like, they're able to to track you through the entire internet regardless of you're logged in or not. I always wonder what the motivations are for companies to open up these platforms. And like, it's pretty clear, like, they're getting some really useful data from folks.

• 36:38David Pierce?

  To that point, actually, one of the things that has surprised me in the course of testing our new site before it went live is how awful some of these embed codes are, because to your point, a lot of these companies have like a really large incentive to do this really well, especially with video, which is this like massively competitive space. And everybody's trying to get you to post on reels instead of shorts, instead of TikTok, whatever. You would think everybody would be competing to like make the best, most shareable thing. But then we put a TikTok embed on our site and it's like 400,000 pixels tall and just randomly breaks and autoplay is when it feels like it. Are these things getting better over time? Or is this just a crappy thing that everybody seems to have kind of forgotten to make better in the process?

• 37:19Speaker 05

  Historically, everything has been getting worse. I mean, it's kind of risky to depend on a third-party embed because there's been so many examples of something of a platform opening up their service to developers and then completely changing how it works or shutting down. I mean, I have plenty of old websites around that had a Google map embedded in it or, you know, an Instagram feed. And they just don't work anymore because they changed the rules of their API. Do you all remember VidMe?

• 37:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, oh, wow.

• 37:50Speaker 05

  Video embedding service? I won't get too deep into that, but like some other company bought it and completely changed what videos were being published on a lot of major media outlets. So there's a lot of risk with embedding third-party scripts or embeds. A lot of like benefits, like Neelai said that he's, we want to use the entire web as a CMS, a content management system. Which is really, really cool, but as a developer who's seen a lot of these things go bad, it's it's a little scary sometimes. There's a bit of risk.

• 38:21Speaker 04

  To throw a bone to the poor product managers who are in charge of embeds at Instagram and Facebook, I feel like they're evaluated on probably two things. And one of them is, how much traffic are they driving back to their own feeds and their own sticky experiences or retention-based experiences? And then the second is, how much data are they collecting, which then also enables them to increase signups or increase retention or whatever their other metrics are. So by those respects, I'm sure that they're doing great. And I think probably our use of embeds for the redesign is probably an edge case. It's a lot more creative than your average drop an Instagram post in a story and let it take over the whole width of the column and be a little annoying. So in defense of those product managers, I'm sure that they're hitting their metrics. But it would be really

• 39:05Speaker 04

  nice if there were just a couple more options for max widths that you could set that were a little bit smaller. Any product managers listening, I will happily send you a really fancy, fancy gift basket. If in the next year, you can ship something like that for us, would be awesome. The poor publishers need some help.

• 39:25David Pierce?

  Dark mode toggle would be good. Ooh, yes. Dark mode toggle. Okay, this is good. We'll end this with just a long list of things that we'd like people to build for us. That seems like it would be good. No, the last thing I want to talk about before I let you go is the future-proofing, kind of like you were talking about, Matt. Because I think one of the interesting moments that we're at right now, like you guys were saying, is the web is changing really fast. The platforms are changing really fast. The odds that all the platforms were using and embedding right now are going to be here or relevant in 10 years when we do this again is vanishingly small. So as you guys are going through this process, I guess, A, how far out into the future is it even useful to think, given how quickly everything changes?

• 40:06David Pierce?

  And then also, is there stuff you can do in this process to give it the longest possible shelf life? Part of developing for tech, to me, just seems like you just have to get comfortable with the idea that every two years, you're going to have to throw everything out and start over because everything just seems to change all the time. Is there stuff that you can and have done to mitigate any of that?

• 40:25Speaker 05

  The short-term problem is kind of working with some of the performance issues that are coming with embedding lots and lots of third-party content onto your site. Long-term, it's a really interesting question. One of the recommendations like by by Google is to use an image of the embed. So like an image of a tweet, they call it, I think they call it a facet. And only when you interact with that image, like hover over it, will it actually load the content. So that's kind of a best practice that is really hard to do, but I think is really worth looking into. With the side effect that third-party embed stopped working in a couple of years, you still have that image.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Which is definitely illegal, and you can definitely get sued for that.

• 41:05Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  I definitely don't speak from experience.

• 41:08Speaker 05

  I don't worry about that part.

• 41:09David Pierce?

  Tara, what about you? What are you thinking about as you think about like the next one, two, five years of this project? Like, have you had to think about that stuff over the last couple of years?

• 41:19Speaker 04

  Definitely. And I'll kind of answer your question with a question, which is, how long should some of this stuff live anyway? And I think in one respect, to play a part in the public record, it's important, and it's important that this stuff live forever, at least in some way. But it doesn't mean that like every Instagram post should live forever, every TikTok should live forever. I think the law maybe made the right call that people should be able to take down their Instagram posts and actually disappear from the internet instead of having like screenshots of things everywhere. Although I really still, to this day, don't know how lawyers like find these screenshots sprinkled everywhere. But two years feels like a great shelf life for like the embeds in an article. And if people take them down, I feel like that's totally fair and it makes some sense.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  And by then, hopefully, we've moved on to newer and better things and people can, whatever the next social network is.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  I don't think there's a technological answer to this because otherwise, all these, all my old websites would still be working. But content should be able to exist without this embed. You know, images all have alt text for screen readers. So maybe the text surrounding the thing, the embed should be able to describe what it was, because it probably will go away one day.

• 42:26David Pierce?

  Then the job for us as The Verge is to preserve the stuff that we make in a way that stands the test of time, rather than worry about trying to archive the entire internet into our own servers.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  So many products, and especially social products, are skewing ephemeral. Not that that's a hip word anymore, but it makes sense that news is ephemeral, too. It just has a bit of a longer shelf life. And thinking of it that way gives me a little bit of peace with the trash embeds that we find on our sites sometimes.

• 42:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, and listen, we have stuff on our site from 10 years ago that is just horribly broken, and I still enjoy it every time I land on it, so it's all right.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  I don't know if Vine embeds still work, but it would be cool if they did.

• 43:07David Pierce?

  Somebody find a VidMe embed and tweet it at us, and we'll see if it works. I'm very excited about it.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Nothing lives forever, and it makes sense that every now and then, it makes sense to start from scratch and build a new platform in whatever the latest programming languages are. It's helpful for attracting great engineering talent like Matt. It's helpful for making sure that we can reevaluate and cut out features that we're not using anymore. It's a good opportunity to take advantage of site speed or whatever other things can help us create a more performant website. So it's bittersweet to launch a new stack sometimes because so much work and so many beautiful features went into the old one. But that's ephemeral, too, I guess.

• 43:48David Pierce?

  Well, thank you both for doing this. Congrats on the end of, well, not the end, but the end of two years of work and the beginning of, I'm sure, many more years of work.

• 43:55Speaker 04

  It's only the beginning.

• 43:57David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:59David Pierce?

  All right, we're going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we're going to get back to Eli and get real big picture and philosophical about the future of Google, the future of search, and the relationship with The Verge and digital media and the future of everything. We'll be right back.

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• 45:41David Pierce?

  Welcome back. And Neelai, welcome back. Hey, buddy. Let's talk about Google, because my sense is that a big part of the future of media thinking that led to this redesign was that, basically, we want to be less reliant on Google as a thing. We've talked about platforms, we've talked about video, but the honest reality is that Google is the main driving force behind most publishers' traffic, I assume, including ours. So what is the bet here on the future of Google and The Verge?

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh man, that is a spicy question. So let me just put that whole thing into context. So I think a lot of people are very familiar with Facebook's relationship to the media. Right. There was a point, I think in early 2013 or 2014, where Facebook just started firing traffic into media sites. Like news on Facebook took off. Everyone realized it. There was a land grab of like, can we make kiddie video webpages for Facebook?

• 46:33David Pierce?

  Right.

• 46:33Nilay Patel?

  And some publishers were massively successful. Then Facebook was like, we're turning that off. And they turned it off and a lot of publishers collapsed.

• 46:39David Pierce?

  There's literally like a knob in Menlo Park that they were just like, never mind.

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they were, they were done. News Feed update, you know, number seven. And then that traffic went away for publishers.

• 46:48David Pierce?

  Right.

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  Because it was dicey for Facebook, right? They were promoting some content, not promoting some content. The politics of that got tortured. That's a long story. I'll just stop it there. Then Facebook was like, video is going to be the thing. And they published a bunch of inflated, inaccurate video numbers. They've since copped to it many times. A bunch of publishers pivoted to video, right? They shut down their newsrooms, made everybody make videos. BuzzFeed put rubber bands around a watermelon till it exploded, you might remember. And everyone thought Facebook video was going to be business. And then Facebook turned it off. And their businesses collapsed and a bunch of people got laid off. That cycle actually repeats outside of Facebook all the time. So our first big traffic fire hose, when we launched The Verge in 2011, was Yahoo.

• 47:27David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  Yahoo would just send us floods of traffic and we would, we would not know why.

• 47:31David Pierce?

  You've told the fish stories, story on the podcast, right?

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I don't know if I told on that, but yes, we, we like did the analysis of where the Yahoo traffic came from. We're like, Yahoo loves stories about fish. So on like very slow Fridays, we would just Google fish technology. There's a great story. Josh Doesa wrote a story about the whoosh fish cannon that like repopulates salmon by like shooting them off a ramp. It's ridiculous. Yahoo loves the story. That's like the worst incentive.

• 47:55David Pierce?

  Right.

• 47:55Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like here's what the algorithm wants. Now The Verge is about fish. Like it makes no sense to the audience, except for the apparently massive Yahoo fish audience. But you just kind of get buffeted around by other people's algorithms. The reason we don't talk about Google that way is because Google for years has basically been stable. Right? And Google's algorithm is essentially the most transparent. It's not actually transparent, but the input and the output is understood. A lot of people are searching for what time the Super Bowl is. So if you publish a page that says, what time is the Super Bowl? Google will efficiently match supply and demand.

• 48:25David Pierce?

  Right. And the difference is, just to put a point on that, like this is, I think you actually said this to me a while ago, that like, the difference is there's at least an input to Google that like, the one way to understand the output is, is as a function of the input. Whereas on like Facebook and other stuff, the input is just like magical, unknown, special sauce.

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you just open Facebook and stuff happens to you.

• 48:43David Pierce?

  Right. You don't tell Facebook, I would like to watch videos about fish. Facebook just figures out that you would like fish. So at least Google is like, the line is not perfectly straight, but there is at least a line from the beginning to the end.

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's in there somewhere. And so like, most publishers have a Google strategy. We're very lucky. We, we publish a lot of reviews. People search for reviews, you know, we publish a lot of explainers about tech, which is, I think, a good audience service. People search for explainers. And so just like everybody, we get a lot of Google traffic. We get a lot of traffic from the Google news box. But our homepage, right up there, it's the second source of our own traffic. People come to our homepage and click on something else. So we had this opportunity that most publishers don't have, which is that our own website drives us a lot of traffic. That's where the opportunity comes from. If we had all bailed and tried to start a new site, I think this would have failed. We, we don't have that huge asset, which is the Verge audience, so we can deliver a better product to. Like, it's the easiest sale in the game. Like, how do you double the revenue of Chick-fil-A?

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  You just open it on Sundays. Like, you just like, it's like the easiest proposition in business. So like, ours is, we just take this thing that people already are telling us they like, but clicking it all day and just like, make it better and more useful. But I just think, I look at Google and I look at this dependency that no one talks about, because it does feel stable. It does feel understandable. Google is generally honest with publishers. That's what the business side of our business tells me. And I said, well, Google, what if it goes away? Right? Like, everything else in my career in publishing has gone away. I should have some hedge against whether this thing goes away. And maybe it won't. Maybe, you know, people will search forever and Google will send them to us forever. Like, that would be great. I'm not saying I absolutely 100% think it's going to go away, but I feel like we should all be hedged against what if the thing goes away?

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  Because the history of digital media is that the thing goes away. So on the one hand, it's, okay, how do I hedge it? And then it's, on the other- And it's like, how do you become the thing? Right? So Ben Thompson, who we talk about the show a lot, he became famous for what he calls aggregation theory, which you can go read. He's like, power on the internet doesn't come from having the supply. It doesn't come from having the product. It comes from owning the demand. And so Google owns the demand and they people tell Google what they want. And Google sends you someplace to fulfill your demand. And that puts Google in an enormous position of power. I think our new site can solve some of that, right? Like, I think we can say to people, come here if you are interested in what's cool on the internet or what's interesting in tech. And we'll send you to those places. Are we are we going to be the size of Google?

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  We are not, but are we going to change our relationship to the audience as opposed to just providing things to Google? I hope so.

• 51:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I think, I mean, the, the, what time does the Super Bowl start thing is an interesting one, right? Cause it's like, that is both sort of like, all the people who write that it's like naked internet cynicism where it's like, okay, people want to know this. I'm going to write something with that exact headline. But it's also audience service. People want to know when the Super Bowl starts. But the thing that Google will do, and if it hasn't yet, I'd be honestly surprised that I'm sure that it will, is just put up one of those knowledge boxes that says the Super Bowl starts at 6:30 PM. And like, we, we've seen a lot of data recently about like the zero click Google search and how much Google is adding to search results in such a way that A, there's 100,000 ads before you get to any actual search results. And B, Google has more and more incentive to A, keep you within Google so that you don't leave. And B, to send you to its own stuff.

• 51:55David Pierce?

  So like, Google is really happy to send you to YouTube and really happy to just answer your questions. Rather than sort of be the like neutral arbiter of everything that it once was. And I haven't totally decided how much I buy the, the sort of conspiracy theory around Google's end game there, whether it's to like capture all of that for itself forever or what. But it does seem like the trend there is Google is like closing at least ever so slightly. And a lot of people are going to have to reckon, I think, with what that means over time.

• 52:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If you just step back and you're like, what would make the best search experience? It's like you ask Google a question and it tells you the answer. I don't think that's controversial.

• 52:35David Pierce?

  Right.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  If you ask it, what time something is, it just tell you like, that's commodity information. The idea that you have to click onto someone else's website and load there, like that's, it's like nonsensical, like, you know, like, should Google have a built in stopwatch? Or should it send traffic to stopwatch companies? Like, that's, it's like fundamentally, at some point, it's just ridiculous.

• 52:52David Pierce?

  Right.

• 52:53Nilay Patel?

  But it is true that Google's money is search. That's still where they make all the money. They make money on YouTube and nothing else makes money. And like, that's weird, right? Like their ads network and they own the entire ad tech stack. They're in the first or second position of every layer of the ad tech stack with one of their divisions. So like, Google monetizes the internet, but like, really the money is in search.

• 53:16David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay, well, if you want to make more money as Google in a uncertain economic time, what lever might you pull? You might keep more search, like, I don't know. It's not like a, I don't know it for sure. It's not an accusation I'm making. It's just, when I think about the future of our website, how do I build a hedge against the thing that always happens, which is the thing goes away? And might I understand a mechanism of this thing going away? And like, you can see one that exists. And then on top of it, like, what's the real goal? The Verge should be fun as hell to read. So if I can solve like this weird business problem with a cool thing, we should just make the coolest thing.

• 53:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, if we can make a place people want to hang out, that's a pretty easy win that solves a lot of problems.

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and hang out at scale. That's the Verge, right? I always say it's a big thing that feels really small. I, I hope it feels really small to people. And I think, actually, for Vergecast listeners, the Verge feels smallest of all, right? It's like this tiny group of people that they hang out with. They tell, we get emails, it feels like I'm hanging out with you guys. Our home, our whole homepage should feel like that, everybody.

• 54:17David Pierce?

  If we were starting The Verge right now, like, The Verge is 11 years old. And like you said, we have this, this longstanding homepage, first.com, it's a very good website, that people go to on purpose. If that wasn't the case, and we were starting from nothing, would we have done it the same way? Like, do you think you can build that direct audience from nothing in 2022? Or can we only even try this because of like, the history and credibility that we have with people?

• 54:43Nilay Patel?

  So I think that's a really good question. I think we have seen a lot of activity around this question in ways that maybe is not expressed in the form of websites. So why do people start newsletters instead of websites now? Because they can send a newsletter right to you. And what does our homepage really look like? Right? Like, part of it looks like a newsfeed, part of it looks like Twitter, part of it looks like we're just live writing a newsletter every day. Like, most great newsletters, Platformer by Casey, Hot Pod by Ariel, like, if you just abstract them into what they are, it's an essay, and then a bunch of blurbs about news. Like, there's a curation function that's built into all the best newsletters. Well, that's our homepage now, right? It's a bunch of cool curation, and then a lot of columns and essays and reports and features and whatever else.

• 55:28David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  There's similarities there to how people are building direct audiences. I just think getting people to come to your website is an ever-increasing ask. Getting people to sign up for your newsletter is actually way easier. So I think you see people doing that way faster.

• 55:42David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. And I think the how do people come to you thing is forever interesting, right? Because it's like, if I have a newsletter, all I have to do is open my email app, which I'm already conditioned to do all the time. Like, if you're in my YouTube subscriptions, you're just in places I already am. And like, I think your point that even if I'm already in my browser, that activity of like, opening a new tab and typing in theverge.com and hitting enter is like, a not small thing to ask of people. And I do wonder if that's like a learned behavior, that people who have it, have it, and people who don't are never going to learn it.

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'll give you an example of some like, homepages I go to. I have the muscle memory of just typing CNN.com three times a day.

• 56:18David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  There's a reason for that. It's because of CNN, they know they have one of the biggest homepages in all of media. And they're just constantly rotating stuff out.

• 56:26David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 56:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, unless something huge is happening, the CNN homepage is always changing. There's a homepage editor. Like, they are moving that page to make it valuable for you every time you come back to it. Most places don't care about their homepage anymore. I'm sure anybody listening to this who works in media, or ads, or marketing, whatever, has heard this interminable conversation on something called side doors, which basically means everybody comes to you on your article page through a platform instead of ever going to your homepage, which is why article pages are festooned with garbage. Right? Everyone tries to make their article page do the jobs of a homepage, and get you to click on one more story, or get you to sign up for something else. We all have the same feelings about that. If you can just make the homepage valuable every time people open it, which you can do with a newsfeed, you can, I hope we can build some of that muscle memory

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  where we reward people for actually coming to our website.

• 57:13David Pierce?

  Okay, all right. And then last thing is like, just talk to me about web design. This is like a thing we at The Verge care deeply about. And I feel like it's an interesting moment, again, as you're talking about to like, think, how should a website look? Like, the last time we did this, I wasn't here, but I'm assuming, having been through like, similar things at different places, there's this question of like, back then, it was like, okay, we have a desktop audience, and we have a mobile audience, and the like responsive web was a thing that everybody talked about, right? And now it's just like, if you don't start with phones, you're blowing it, because that's how most people will experience you at all times. And like, The Verge.com looks very different now than it did in the past.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:49David Pierce?

  But I wouldn't say it's like structurally completely overhauled. It's not like you're like, the internet doesn't need headlines, and we're gonna put the images at the bottom.

• 57:59Nilay Patel?

  We should do that. I don't know, like, where have you been?

• 58:02David Pierce?

  But like, was there ever a moment where it was like, is there a blow up in how we think about what a news website could look like process? Like, how far down that road did we go?

• 58:12Nilay Patel?

  Pretty far.

• 58:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  I think one thing maybe people should take note of here is, we've mostly talked about how the site works.

• 58:19David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 58:20Nilay Patel?

  We have not talked about how it looks. But it looks totally different. It's beautiful. We have a new logo. We haven't talked about the new logo for one second, right? Like, at the core of this, what we, what we spent all of our time thinking about is, how does this site work? What is the software product that we are shipping to millions of people a day? How does it operate? And then, how does our team run it, right? We changed where all the buttons are, like, we have to assign people to push the buttons. So we had to like restructure our team a little bit to support this task. That said, the site looks way different, right? And we have thought really long and hard about how it looks on mobile, of course. But also, just like, how does a news page work? What should that experience be? I'll give you this really dumb example. So we actually launched The Verge without a great mobile site.

• 59:05Nilay Patel?

  All of our readers were on desktop in 2011. And if you remember, we had like 95 apps. We had like a Windows Phone app.

• 59:11David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  And somewhere along the way, we're like this, and what are we doing? So we shut down all these apps, because it costs so much to maintain. It was really hard to ship the web into apps back then for a variety of reasons. Now it's a lot easier. Maybe we'll have an app someday. Not today. Tell the CEO I want an app. So then we shut that all down. We added a mobile page to the old design. And then when we redesigned The Verge, if you just look at that redesign, yep, we had a bunch of new elements, but we just cleaned it up for mobile, right? That was like the big thrust of that redesign. When you talk about distributed publishing is we've got to pare this thing down to its most essential elements so that when Facebook Instant Articles like reconstitutes a webpage, it still looks like us. That whole redesign was just about refinement and like minimizing what we needed to convey that we were The Verge.

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  And that really is where neon colors came from. These are bright pink. You see it, that's us. Like that, we were like dead on with that. We had all those like laser lines everywhere. Why? Because we wanted people to see the laser line and know that was us. This redesign carries a lot of that through, right? We know people are going to mostly see us on phones, but a lot of it is phones are huge now. Like the screens are really big, so we can do, and the, everybody has a retina screen now. That wasn't necessarily true when we last redesigned the site. So we can go to things like serif fonts. We can have different kinds of images on the page. We can make the images bigger in some cases. We can make the images smaller, actually, because they're still big. So there's just a lot of that tweaking for like the modern era.

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  And then there's also just the recognition, this is like some Real Verchess stuff, that image aspect ratios are all over the place now. Yep. So the first Verge was a 16 by nine website. Like, that's what it was. And it was designed to produce 16 by nine images on a landscape desktop display. This is like, we have to be comfortable with portrait images. We have to be comfortable with square images. So there's actually a lot of backend work to just support and deliver the right aspect ratio of image and the right article at the right time. And it's not, the headlines are at the bottom, like level web redesign thinking. It's more like, actually, a mobile article page has to deliver to a phone with assets that are phone native, and maybe the desktop version should look totally different.

• 1:01:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, that to me, like even as we've been, you know, beta testing this thing, like discovering what a TikTok embed looks like when you just make it its own thing is deeply hilarious. And trying to figure out how to like pull all of that stuff into one place in a way that they all make sense, next to all of the other stuff that we all do, turned out to be way harder than I expected. And it's the kind of thing that no one has ever really done, right? Like, most news websites are text, right? Like, it is overwhelmingly paragraphs of text and images. And we've been through this a million times. When you try to build something else, you have to like build a sort of bespoke thing that can contain it. And then you go to the video apps and they support video. And then even when you get like the landscape video in the vertical video app, it looks bad.

• 1:02:05David Pierce?

  And this task of figuring out how to sort of be all things to all people with all media is fascinating. And it's going to be like, we definitely have not fully solved that problem and no one has. And there's a lot left to do, but I think like, that's where all of this has to go because this stuff just is so multimedia now.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you sound like a 1990s CD-ROM vendor.

• 1:02:26David Pierce?

  I know, I love it.

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  What we've shipped here today is Microsoft and Carta. We hope you like it. You'll need at least a 4X speed CD-ROM drive to make it work in a 386.

• 1:02:34David Pierce?

  It comes on 11 CDs.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  But a beautiful leather binder. You know, it's like, I'll just end on this story. Like, we have been testing all these embeds and you realize, like, very little thought goes into embeds for anyone but YouTube. YouTube, gold standard of embeds. Like, the embed is the size of the video, all of the necessary controls and layouts of the embed are contained in the frame. Everyone knows what a YouTube video is. The play button conveys all the branding they need to. They don't send you the comments with it, or you can't like it. It's like, they're just like, here's our video. Like, we're so confident in ourselves as YouTube. Like, here's a video, and if people want to read the comments on YouTube video, they damn well know to like click on the top and go to YouTube and read it. Instagram is like, here's 5,000 vertical pixels.

• 1:03:20David Pierce?

  It's so tall.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  Here is all of Instagram in an embed, right? TikTok is the same way. And Twitter, the embeds are getting bigger. And you just see the platform companies don't care about the web. Like, I will make that accusation. And like, that is not meaningful to them that their content travels outside of their walls. And when it does, they're like, we have now colonized you in like, the most direct way we can by effectively embedding our whole platform onto your page. Whereas YouTube, I think because it is like, infrastructure of the web in some serious way, the embed is like respectful. Because YouTube knows that everyone will just go back to YouTube in a way that I think Instagram and TikTok and Twitter like, lack of the confidence of knowing that people will go back to them.

• 1:04:04David Pierce?

  When you embed the Verge on your website, you just get every story we've ever published.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh dude, we're gonna, our posts are gonna get embeddable. I think that'll be like, one of the fun turns here in the end.

• 1:04:14David Pierce?

  I like it. So, any, any product stuff to tease for people who are listening? What's next? I don't even know the answer to this question.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  So we, we're gonna ship this version, our product team keeps calling it Verge 2.0, out of my head, it's like Verge 12, you know, but whatever. We're gonna ship a point one pretty soon. We are currently prioritizing what goes on point one. I've got one big idea, which I will tease a little bit. I think we now have the tools to do much better event coverage. So that's first on my list is how do we kind of remix what we've built here into a much better experience for an Apple event or something like that? And then I really want to focus on some of this community stuff, but I really want the community to tell us what you would like, so we can build the right stuff.

• 1:04:52David Pierce?

  Awesome. Yeah, get at us. Call the Verge hotline, send us emails, tell us everything you want from theverge.com. It's a website.

• 1:04:58Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna revolutionize the media with Vlogpost.

• 1:05:01David Pierce?

  Alright, thanks man. Appreciate it.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  Thanks.

• 1:05:04David Pierce?

  Alright, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you as always for listening. You can check out our brand new website, theverge.com, right now and forever. Refresh the page a million times. We'll thank you later. We'll be doing a lot of fun stuff there too, so keep it bookmarked and refresh it often. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Norrie Donovan is our executive producer and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, letters to the editor, thoughts about the website, thoughts about websites in general, you can always email [email protected]. Alex Neillino, we back on Friday to talk about all the Apple reviews, which are coming, and I know you'll want to hear about them. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

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