The Verge began when a group of Engadget writers walked out together
In spring 2011, editor Joshua Topolsky and a group of colleagues quit AOL's gadget blog Engadget to start something of their own. While the new site was being built, they kept their podcast going on a stopgap blog called This Is My Next. By autumn it had millions of readers, and in November it became The Verge.
The walkout included managing editor Nilay Patel and writers such as Paul Miller and Joanna Stern. They partnered with SB Nation, a sports site whose chief, Jim Bankoff, had ironically led AOL's purchase of Engadget in 2005 and saw technology as a natural expansion. His company, soon renamed Vox Media, supplied its in-house publishing system, Chorus. The interim blog reached a million unique visitors within months, and Time named it one of the best blogs of 2011.
The Verge launched on November 1, 2011, claiming 4 million unique visitors at the start, and within a year collected five Webby Awards, including best writing and best podcast for The Vergecast. A science section followed in 2013, and its YouTube channel later passed 1.15 million subscribers. Patel took over from Topolsky as editor-in-chief in 2014, and veteran columnist Walt Mossberg joined after Vox bought Recode.
Not everything went smoothly. In 2016 the site fired its deputy editor after discovering he had secretly been working for Apple. In 2018 a video on building a gaming PC was mocked for errors at nearly every step, including far too much thermal paste. When Vox lawyers then got critical YouTube responses taken down on copyright grounds, the backlash was described as a textbook Streisand effect, and the videos were restored after Patel intervened.
Its logo has at times been a Penrose triangle, an impossible shape. The site introduced a paywall for premium reports in December 2024 at 7 dollars a month, which Patel framed as a matter of survival for rigorous independent journalism, and moved from Chorus to WordPress in January 2025. In June 2026 Penske Media agreed to acquire it along with other Vox brands.
Source: The Verge
