According to “explainer” newsbrand Vox the rate of increase for new paying members grew 350% in the two months following Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in January.
Although Vox declined to share an exact number of paying members, editor-in-chief and publisher Swati Sharma told Press Gazette “people are really hungry for the context” amid the high rate of actions taken by Trump in the early weeks of his second presidency.
The title invites readers to support it with payments of between $5 and $50 per month. Members benefit from exclusive perks and unlimited online access.
Sharma said: “I think they really want clarity in this moment, because there’s just so much noise and so much going on, it’s kind of hard to keep up with what’s happening.”
Vox Media is now rolling out a new tagline, “Making sense of it all”, and a mission statement: “Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters.”
Vox.com, owned by Vox Media alongside brands like New York Magazine and The Verge, was founded in 2014 with the goal of explaining the news in a way that no-one else was doing.
Sharma said the “biggest difference” from Trump’s first term was “the types of stories people are hungry for”: last time, the dominant narrative was the “palace intrigue” inside the White House.
She said: “I’m so grateful that there are organisations that do cover every twist and turn and they’re there serving their audience… for our audience, they aren’t necessarily keeping up with every single thing that’s happening and even if they are, they want that step-back explanation that we can provide. So I do think [in] this administration, almost for everyone, there is more of a desire of explanatory journalism and understanding the context.”
Eleven years on from Vox’s launch, Sharma, who joined in March 2021 from The Atlantic where she was managing editor, said she is proud of the brand’s impact and the fact “explainers are everywhere” – especially in video formats.
But she said this has forced Vox to “go on this journey of trying to really figure out how we are distinctive” since her arrival.
“Explaining the news and explaining everything just wasn’t the right strategy, and it wasn’t giving us a distinctiveness… how we’re distinctive is still core to our roots, which is that we provide the context, and you don’t need to read five stories to consume our work. What we’ve done is just double down on that idea.”
Adding paid memberships to Vox’s business model has been a “core part of that evolution. If you know your identity really well, you can then communicate it to the members and to the audience that you want to have them become part of the community.”
How Vox memberships have evolved: ‘We saw the opportunity to build a community’
Starting in April 2020 Vox let users show their support for its journalism via one-off donations. Last year it added a more formal membership scheme with some member-only content and quarterly Q&As with its journalists, and in January this year a dynamic paywall was added to the site (although certain stories “that we think need to be available to everyone as a public service” remain free to all).
This week ad-free podcasts have been added as a perk for paying members.
Sharma said: “We really saw the opportunity to build a community with people who love and consume Vox… I think consumer revenue is really important in terms of a business model, but also just in terms of the brands and who we are. It just makes so much sense for us to have this kind of strategy and to want to build that community.”
Paid memberships have recently been promoted at the top of the Vox homepage, above any stories. Vox promises: “Clarity in this chaotic news cycle.”
Readers are told: “The news moves fast, but understanding takes time. At Vox, we don’t chase every headline. We focus on what really matters. We break down the biggest stories — and the ones others overlook — so you can make sense of the world, not just react to it.
“We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?”
The revamping of the membership programme coincided with Trump’s inauguration and a Vox spokesperson said two months later that new memberships were up 4.5 times since then.
Vox also brings in revenue through advertising and grants from foundations. Sharma explained: “I think Vox is a very mission-driven organisation, and we cover a lot of topics that are under-covered elsewhere, like biodiversity, animal welfare… a diversified business model is very important, but it’s also, I think, very important for journalists to think about the business model as well, because often they do go hand in hand in a healthy way.”
Vox audience is in three buckets according to editor Swati Sharma
Sharma put Vox’s audience into three buckets, starting with people who are “curious and hungry for information. Sometimes they may be a little confused or overwhelmed, but really curiosity is a driving force for that group.”
Secondly she pointed to people who “want to do good in the world”. They especially consume the Future Perfect section and Vox’s video and podcasts, she said.
Thirdly, there are the policymakers: “Our work is always approachable, but because we do go deep and we have a lot of depth, policymakers do like consuming our journalism.” For example, Sharma added, policy correspondent Rachel Cohen’s housing stories “appeal to a general audience, but also to policymakers who are thinking about housing solutions”.
Sharma added: “We’re not going to write about every time the market goes up or down, but we will explain to you, like, here’s what tariffs will do. Here’s the actual deep roots of tariffs and the fight that’s looming in the Trump coalition, and why you need to pay attention. Why there’s a death of neoliberalism that is creating all of these new initiatives and policies from the Trump administration. We’ll tell you the roots of these things.”
Vox for news avoiders and people that don’t trust the media
Sharma said Vox is “trying to create very specific journalism” for people who can be classed as “news avoiders”.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism last year said the number of people selectively avoiding the news had reached a new high of 39% across 20 key markets since its Digital News Report research began in 2012. In the US (Vox’s main market), 43% of people said they felt worn out by the news, up from 40% in 2019, while the proportion who said they were extremely or very interested in the news has fallen from 67% in 2015 to 52%.
“People fully avoiding all of this noise, what they perceive to be as noise,” Sharma said. “And we’re an antidote to all of that. We’re here to bring people along and help them consume the journalism.”
She cited as an example daily Vox newsletter The Logoff, which tells readers it “helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life” in a way that Sharma said “encapsulates exactly what Vox does.
“Every day you’ll get 200-300 words of what is the thing that Trump is doing that you should pay attention to, and the thing that I love about it the most is that when there isn’t something to pay attention to, we’ll tell you. That hasn’t happened yet – but what did happen was we’ll also tell you when we get something wrong. So on Wednesday [5 March], we said you should pay attention to tariffs, and on Thursday, our writer for the newsletter Patrick [Reis], he then wrote ‘well, actually, I was wrong yesterday’ and I think that’s brilliant.”
Meanwhile daily news explainer podcast – Today, Explained – is often accompanied by uplifting music when talking about “something really depressing. It’s a daily podcast, but we don’t always cover Trump every day.”
Vox has around 85 staff with about a quarter of those working in audio, which Sharma described as “incredibly important to us” adding that they have “been able to create something really distinctive in that space” and it creates such a personal connection with listeners.
As well as Today, Explained, which can be heard on more than 120 US public radio stations, there are three weekly shows: The Gray Area with a “philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas”, Unexplainable looking at “scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and everything we learn diving into the unknown”, and Explain It To Me, which answers audience questions in a way that Sharma said is “audience-centric: a very Vox thing to do”.
Meanwhile according to Press Gazette’s ranking of publishers on Youtube, where Vox’s video output is concentrated, the brand tops the charts for the highest average views per video and is among the most-followed newsbrands with 12.5 million subscribers. Sharma noted that they “came early to it and “spearheaded a new format” for explainers.
Among its biggest recent videos are “Why the US has birthright citizenship” (1.3 million views), “How de-aging in movies got so good” (1.1 million) and “How Trump’s second term will be different” (5.3 million).
“Another big thing that makes Vox distinctive is there are very few places who are as strong on video, audio and text, and we are,” Sharma said.
According to Similarweb, Vox.com attracts some 12.3 million visits per month (putting it outside the top-50 US news websites).
Amid widespread concern in the news media industry about Google AI Overviews and other AI services reducing clickthrough rates by providing users with enough of an answer to their queries, Sharma said that she believes “in this era the best thing we can do is original journalism. I think that’s what we do. We write the stories that are hidden in plain sight that you may not expect. And of course the stories that really help you through the big news moments as well.
“So I think that as long as we do that, that’s the thing I’m focusing on, that’s the thing that I can control, and that’s the thing that’s good for our audience and for journalism.”
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