Digiday reported on October 19 that The Verge has reorganized its audience team away from search, distribution, and referral traffic, and toward turning casual visitors into direct, loyal readers. Esther Cohen, its director of audience and subscriptions, described the change at the Digiday Publishing Summit.
Most of the coverage of this story focused on Google. A publisher bracing for less search traffic is not news anymore. The staffing change is.
What did The Verge actually change?
Three things, per that report.
They traded generalists for specialists. Cohen is quoted saying, “We now have a bunch of specialists.” The roles named include a newsletter specialist handling acquisition and email, two specialists for platform and community engagement, and a newsroom analyst who works with editors on what content and headlines land.
They changed what they measure. Team members now carry individual growth targets rather than being judged mainly on page views.
They segmented their audience: anonymous visitors, registered users, and paying subscribers. Different work for each.
Worth noting what the article does not say. It gives no traffic percentages, no subscriber count and no revenue figures. The only number offered is that most subscription sign-ups come from people who go straight to the sign-up page, and that share moves month to month. Treat the rest as direction, not proof.
Why does this apply to a business with six people?
Because the structural problem is identical and the scale is irrelevant.
If you measure marketing on traffic, your marketing will produce traffic. That is not cynicism about people. It is how measurement works. Set page views as the target, and you will get headlines written for clicks, channels chosen for volume, and no one responsible for what happens after the visit.
The Verge’s move admits the metric was shaping the work in the wrong direction. Page views were a reasonable proxy when search sent predictable traffic and ads paid per impression. When the traffic stops being predictable, the proxy stops standing in for anything.
Ask yourself what you measure in marketing. Then ask what you actually need it to produce. For most owner-operators, the answers are visits and followers, and qualified inquiries from people who can pay. Those are different jobs, and the first doesn’t reliably lead to the second.
The specialist point, carefully
I want to be careful here, because hiring specialists is bad advice for a small company, and I am not giving it.
The Verge has a team to divide. You may have one marketing person, or half of one, or yourself at nine in the evening. You cannot hire a newsletter specialist.
What you can take is the underlying move: name the jobs separately even when the same person does all of them. Getting attention, converting attention into a contact, and keeping a relationship with that contact are three different crafts. Collapsed into one role called marketing, the first one eats the other two every time, because it is the most visible and the most immediately rewarding.
Write them down as three separate lines with three separate measures. One person can still own all three. They will just stop pretending the first one is the whole job.
If the second and third are the ones you have been neglecting, and they usually are, that is the subject of Engagement, which is about the difference between an audience that shows up and an audience that responds. And when the content side of it needs more hands than you have, that is the work a content marketing agency takes off your desk.
The part I would act on this week costs nothing. Decide what your marketing is for, and change what you measure to match. Everything else follows from that, and nothing follows without it.