1 hour ago
1
Vox has launched its first mobile application, the publication best known for its explanatory journalism announced Wednesday morning.
The app, which puts Vox’s text, audio, and video in one feed, is the company’s latest bet on growing paid membership. Users can choose between a home tab of featured pieces or a chronological feed of the latest stories. While the app is free to download and browse, it’s catered toward serving Vox journalism to paid subscribers in one place. Vertical videos and podcasts are free to watch and listen to, but only paid subscribers can read text stories and listen to podcasts ad-free.
Vox declined to share specific paid membership numbers, though the company said in May that it had “tens of thousands of paid subscribers.” The program was launched in May 2024. James Murdoch — son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch — purchased Vox.com along with the Vox Media Podcast Network and New York Magazine for more than $300 million in May 2026.
Growing membership is a “key priority,” managing editor for audience and membership Bill Carey said. Vox believes launching the app is one way to do that. A Vox membership costs $5 per month, or $60 per year, and offers ad-free versions of podcasts and unlimited access to all of the website’s contents.
Strengthening its relationship to its audience is only becoming more important for Vox. The app launch comes at a time when news publishers are increasingly trying to keep users on their own platforms amid growing preferences for AI summaries, news creators, and industry-wide traffic declines.
“The move toward developing our membership program in the last couple of years has really been about understanding how important it is for us to build more community and to foster that loyalty [of our] audience,” Carey said. “When we were looking at that, it really felt like an app was a good way to continue pointing in that direction.”
Vox isn’t the only news outlet focusing on mobile apps. The Verge — Vox’s former sister publication under Vox Media — named traffic declines as one of the reasons why it plans to launch its own app next year. The Wall Street Journal’s head of digital, Taneth Evans, recently said that the Journal makes its app more useful to users by offering all of its mediums in one place. Evans also said that news publishers “need to give people reasons to open an app beyond simply offering news.”
“Websites will become a service for agents,” Evans said. “Apps are gonna be the thing that humans will connect with.”
Vox declined to provide website traffic numbers, but data from Comscore shows that the website’s unique visitors decreased by 36% year-over-year between September 2025 (7.4 million) and September 2026 (4.8 million). Archived data from SimilarWeb shows the site had 20.8 million visits in September 2021.
Vox is one of the most popular news brands on YouTube with more than 12.7 million followers. The publication has one million Instagram followers, plus Substack subscribers and paid Patreon members. Vox launched its Patreon in November 2025, though its two video series exclusive to the platform have not been updated since January.“Even if there wasn’t a decline in search traffic, as everyone has been seeing — and we still get members from search — we want to create that relationship with our audience,” publisher and editor-in-chief Swati Sharma said. “People know Vox and they have a relationship with Vox. We have a younger audience that’s on all of these different platforms. I think it is definitely a part of building that relationship ourselves.”
That the app makes all Vox content accessible in one place for current and future members also signals the “un-siloing” of the newsroom overall, Sharma said. Vox currently has 78 editorial employees.
When Sharma, who has helmed Vox.com since 2021, first arrived, she found that Vox’s main mediums (text, audio, and video) “weren’t in service of one another.” The “silos” allowed teams to build their own audiences and products. But while teams discussed story ideas with each other and during editorial meetings, “they all [needed] to go into their creative spaces and find what works for their medium and not be in service of just one larger section.”
That’s changed over the past five years, Sharma said. Each team — text, video, and audio — does a little bit of everything now. Text reporters appear on podcasts and in videos, while podcasters and hosts also write their own newsletters.
“In a lot of newsrooms, there’s one dominant form, and at Vox, there wasn’t. They’re all really important,” Sharma said. “[Senior correspondent] Dylan Scott is on our Unexplainable podcast talking about Alzheimer’s. [Host and editorial director] Astead Herndon does a newsletter and a Substack Live every week, and he does a podcast. That’s the future for us, and that’s where our whole newsroom is moving, where those silos are done and you can basically do everything.”
