The Verge Adds a Subscription

[ace (Adam Engst)]

Originally published at: The Verge Adds a Subscription - TidBITS

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, writes:

Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. It costs $7/month or $50/year.

…

It’s no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it’s clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet.

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free.

…

So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free. We know so many of you depend on us to curate the news every day, and we’re going to stay focused on making a great homepage that’s worth checking out regularly, whether you pay us or not.

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.

I’ve subscribed, partly because The Verge does excellent reporting, but more to support a business model for high-quality journalism that doesn’t rely entirely on advertising.

[niallom (Niall O'Mara)]

I’d like to support quality journalism but I just can’t subscribe to everything I listen to or read. It’s easier to do this if are a professional tech commentator or podcaster as you can list all your subscriptions as legitimate business expenses but that’s not the case for most of us.

I wish the Verge the best but my experience so far (failed attempt to read one single article) has made me look elsewhere for tech news.

(The recent M4 iMac review wasn’t much of an incentive to keep reading anyway.)

[jimblock]

I used to read the Verge daily; I found some stories interesting, others not. I thought their plan for subscription sounded OK although I didn’t plan to subscribe. However since then I’ve stopped going to the site altogether because almost all the stores I wanted to read are behind the subscription paywall.