By Sara Guaglione
Publication Date: 2026-10-19 04:01:00
The Verge is rethinking what it means to grow an audience in the post-search era.
After years of prioritizing SEO, content distribution, virality and referral traffic, the Vox Media-owned tech publisher has reorganized its audience team around turning casual site visitors into loyal, direct readers.
Over the past two years, The Verge has moved away from generalist audience development roles in favor of specialists focused on areas like newsletters, platform engagement and audience analytics.
“As we saw the landscape change, and as we really continued to invest in increasing the user value and investing in our homepage and direct audience, we did change how the audience team was structured quite a bit,” Esther Cohen, director of audience and subscriptions at The Verge, said onstage at the Digiday Publishing Summit last month. “Rather than having a bunch of content strategists or social media managers doing a little bit of everything, we now have a bunch of…