Making the “ruthless” business case for the #OpenSocialWeb, here is Helen Halvack from the Verge:
Helen: “I’ll give you the ruthless business answer of why I’m interested in open social web projects like Surf from the Flipboard team. So platforms like MetaX, they are openly hostile to news content in their algorithms. They have moved away from that.
They are no longer great discovery sources for us. Links in general even. Forget news, just links. They’re not like good places to hang out anymore.
Could you start the Verge now, the way we started The Verge, or you started The Verge 15 years ago? The answer is like probably not, or you would need a lot more money because starting something for free and finding audiences for free is much harder now.
A lot of audience discovery is people buying ads from Mark Zuckerberg, right? I would rather not give money to Mark Zuckerberg. I would rather spend money on journalists in our newsroom, which means the discovery problem, like can we solve it a different way?
…To the point of discovery, I would love to acquire acquisition channels for us where, again, I don’t have to pay to play.
The open social web is a lot more friendly to news. I think there’s opportunity there for how do you get the next cohort of Verge audience. And then as Nilay said, as we think about our website, our product experience, I think there’s really fun ideas about how you create new product experiences that attract people to The Verge, because the open social web, you can surface in all kinds of different ways.
So that would be my cold business answer of, I would rather give our money to the newsroom than be buying acquisition from Meta or whoever.”
From The Vergecast: The Vergecast Vergecast, 2026 edition, Apr 21, 2026