Verge is my #1 place to get tech news. I read it daily. Last week, I visited the site to see a complete overhaul of the design of the homepage. You can read more about the redesign here.
Coming from a background of AB testing the smallest changes in, I found this move to be very bold. This level of risk taking is rare on the Internet, especially for a big player like The Verge. They stand to lose so many readers. This is part of the reason I love going to the site: a strong sense of direction on where they are going.
Mentioned this in the post but @backlon and I really did make one of the first prototypes of our feed in Google Docs last year. We just had fun blogging into a doc for most of an afternoon, to figure out what we needed.
— nilay patel (@reckless) September 13, 2022
Sometimes you have to just start, somewhere. Anywhere. pic.twitter.com/gKrZdPpW00
So many companies don’t do big do overs once they see big $ roll in. The need to keep revenue flowing makes them risk-averse. Companies become less innovative.
This is partly due to how websites acquire traffic. Everyone on the Internet relies on search engines to find content. Most sites are tweaked to be crawled by search engine bots, making it easy to index and recommend. But this is an awkward relationship between websites and Google, the biggest search engine.
The Vergecast, their “flagship” podcast, featured an entire episode on their thinking and challenges behind the redesign. Part of what they highlighted was media companies’ over-reliance on Google.
Listen from 45:18:
Websites are locked in a loop with Google: what customers query vs what the site content provide. With more search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, these two come together, leading to creation of landing pages that allow traffic to flow in and cater to customer need. No one searches for brands; they search for specific queries like “romantic hotels in Brisbane” (there is none 🤣). Building specific pages that answers the queries will help customers find content.
In this world, homepages are useless; Google is the homepage of the Internet. Most traffic goes to specific landing pages built for keywords. If the site content is relevant to a Google property like Maps or Travel, they tend to feature this content in even more relevant format. All of this lead to sites being littered with content for bots and focused on final part of the “funnel” (just before someone buys something).
This isn’t all bad. Customers benefit. Google Maps is fkn great. Issue is that it is hard to safeguard content or help people associate with your brand. Yelp, among many others, has had a lot of issues. It also makes it difficult to veer off track from what search bots look for, which may lead to poor SEO and customers not finding you. It is what makes the Internet bland and downright boring. No one bothers to try anything new or do cool designs.
That’s why a lot of innovation goes into native apps instead. Once an app is downloaded, there is brand loyalty. Users are more open to new ways of organising content and presenting functionalty. There are no Snapchats and TikToks starting up on the web, despite it being the most accessible place for all people. Reliance on search engines and how they dictate a site be organised makes it really hard to generate a long term relationship with users.
So I’m glad to see The Verge take a swing at some new ideas.