News & analysis
The Verge Restructures Audience Team for a Post-Search Web
The Verge has reorganized its audience team to focus on converting casual visitors into direct, loyal readers as search referral traffic declines.
By Roomer Editorial · · 3 min read
What changed at The Verge?
The Verge has rebuilt its audience team around direct readers instead of search traffic. Esther Cohen, director of audience and subscriptions at The Verge, said the Vox Media-owned publisher moved away from generalist roles toward specialists.
Previously, content strategists and social media managers each did a bit of everything. Now, team members focus on specific channels and are judged on individual growth targets rather than page views.
Cohen said the shift followed years of prioritizing SEO, content distribution, and referral traffic. The goal now is identifying high-value audiences, figuring out how to reach them, and delivering content suited to the platform they're on.
Why is this happening now?
Search referral traffic has been declining across publishing as AI-driven search changes how people find content online. Digiday has reported that The Verge is one of several publishers restructuring newsrooms in response.
Melissa Chowning, founder and CEO of audience development firm Twenty-First Digital, said giving dedicated attention to specific areas — from email marketing to social analytics — makes sense given the pressure publishers face on search traffic.
Unlike some reorgs, The Verge's hasn't come with layoffs. Cohen said the audience team has actually grown over the past two years, though she declined to specify by how much.
How are other publishers responding?
USA Today announced its own overhaul in September. Monica Richardson, svp at USA Today, introduced a new audience and digital production team along with a new executive editor role overseeing audience and digital production.
That restructuring focuses on centralized production, audience growth within specific coverage areas, and distribution off-platform. Unlike The Verge, USA Today's changes have included layoffs.
Reach CEO Piers North has also discussed this shift, telling Digiday about his plans to use the company's Google AI content deal as a blueprint framework for other deals with large language model companies. Reach has also sent OpenAI a cease-and-desist letter.
At The Independent, the business impact is already measurable. CEO Christian Broughton said social-commerce revenue passed SEO-based commerce revenue for the first time in September.
What is The Verge doing instead of chasing search traffic?
The Verge is testing paid media and performance marketing, but Cohen says the approach is cautious. She declined to share budget figures.
Cohen said being deliberate about where that money goes and what return it generates matters more than spend volume.
The team is also pushing traditional organic social marketing — ads on The Verge's own site and podcasts — and pitching exclusive stories to larger outlets to extend reach without depending on search.
Roomer Editorial's take
This is the same math independent creators have been running for a while, just with a newsroom's budget behind it. The Verge figured out that a visitor who finds you through Google once and never returns isn't worth the same as someone who comes back on their own. Direct traffic compounds. Referral traffic doesn't.
Travel creators are in a stronger position than most publishers here, because the fix doesn't require a reorg. It requires owning the page the audience lands on. A creator posting Lisbon hotel reels doesn't need a specialist team to figure out which channel drives return visits — they need a site that's theirs, built from the content they already made, where a viewer can book instead of bouncing back to a search result.
That's the structural difference between a publisher chasing algorithm changes and a creator with Roomer Pro: your own travel site built from your videos isn't something you have to reorganize toward. It's the starting point.
The other lesson here is about measurement. Cohen scrapped page views for individual growth targets because page views don't tell you whether someone came back. Creators should apply the same discipline to booking pages — not just views on a video, but whether that audience converts and returns to book again, something a bookable page attached to your own site makes possible in a way a platform profile never will.
Action: audit your highest-performing travel videos and check whether they currently funnel anywhere you control, or just sit on a platform you don't own.
Source: Digiday — The Verge switches up its audience team to prepare for Google Zero
