The lead  ·  01

The Verge Rebuilt Its Audience Team for a Post-Search Web. Over Half of Subscriber Sign-Ups Start at Its Own Page

The Verge has reorganised its audience team around turning casual visitors into direct readers, with specialists in newsletters, platform engagement and audience analytics replacing generalists.

Also on the wire

More from this issue

The week in one paragraph

This was the week the rules behind the platforms’ moves became visible, and most of them pointed at who a publisher can verify and who it can’t. Apple’s engineers explained that the Safari block targets email-based IDs and that even a single-company ID graph counts as tracking, while The Verge showed what a publisher does with the readers it can identify: more than half of its subscriber acquisition now comes from people who go straight to the sign-up page. Amazon pitched Thursday Night Football as a gateway to its DSP and launched an AI ads agent it says cut beta CPMs 18%, Netflix added a pixel and The Trade Desk, and LinkedIn took its B2B audiences to CTV through DV360. Independent agencies described paying a DSP and a reseller on top of each other, an Axis executive argued that more CTV partners can mean the same impression sold three ways, and a study found 2,116 AI recipe sites in the ad supply chain. U.S. and U.K. publishers backed near-identical laws to make stealth crawlers identify themselves. The week is thinner than a full twelve, and publishers do not hold a majority of it: they have four stories, platforms four, buyers two and regulators one.