The story. The Verge has reorganised its audience team around turning casual visitors into direct readers, and more than half of its subscriber acquisition now comes from people who go straight to the sign-up page. (Digiday, 19 October 2026)
01What happened
- Specialists replaced generalists. Over two years The Verge moved away from content strategists and social managers who did a little of everything, toward specialists in newsletters, platform engagement and audience analytics.
- The team has its own roles. One newsletter specialist owns top-of-funnel acquisition, two specialists run platform and community engagement, and a newsroom analyst studies what anonymous users, registered users and subscribers read.
- Page views are no longer the target. Esther Cohen, the director of audience and subscriptions, said each team member now has their own growth targets.
- The audience is split into three segments. Anonymous visitors, registered users and paying subscribers each get tactics, such as personalised feeds and community features for registration, and exclusive content for retention.
- Direct traffic does the converting. More than half of subscriber acquisition comes from readers going straight to the subscription sign-up page. The Verge launched its metered, dynamic paywall in December 2024.
- The team grew. Unlike the USA Today restructure, which came with layoffs, The Verge’s audience team has expanded. Cohen declined to give headcount, subscriber numbers or revenue.
- Paid reach is used cautiously. The Verge is testing paid media and performance marketing, but Cohen said high-spend performance marketing may not bring the long-lived users it wants.
02What it means inside a GAM network
Earlier APH pieces covered the loss: referral traffic falling, and publishers modelling life without Googlebot. This one covers what a publisher does with the audience that is left.
The three segments are three different ad products. Anonymous visitors are the open-auction audience, where the signal is thinnest. Registered users give you a login and an email, which is the raw material for a publisher-provided identifier. Subscribers are often a smaller ad-supported audience or an ad-light one, depending on the paywall.
That makes registration a yield decision as much as a growth one. A reader who logs in can be passed to buyers with an identifier that survives browsers limiting cross-site IDs. The conversion of an anonymous reader into a registered one is therefore also a move up the floor ladder in Ad Manager. That link is APH desk analysis; Digiday does not report The Verge’s ad revenue by segment.
The Verge’s own sign-up evidence supports the funnel logic. If more than half of subscribers arrive by going directly to the sign-up page, the homepage and the newsletter are doing work that search used to do. Both are surfaces where a publisher controls the ad layout and the data.
The limit on the evidence: this is one large, brand-led publisher with a paywall. A mid-size ad-supported site will not copy a team of newsroom analysts and platform specialists. The segment logic carries over; the headcount does not.
The Verge shows what the post-search audience job looks like: fewer visitors counted, more of them known.
03What publishers should do about it
04The bottom line
The Verge shows what the post-search audience job looks like: fewer visitors counted, more of them known. Segment your own sessions now, and price the registered reader before search forces the question.