In the month of October, comScore reports The Verge racked up 3.1 million unique U.S. visitors. It’s an impressive start but still a ways behind longtime incumbents like Gawker Media’s Gizmodo, which had 6.5 million uniques. The number for AOL’s Engadget, which Vox raided to create its editorial team, was 6.3 millon.

The Verge is “very profitable” and has sold out its advertising inventory for months, according to Chief Content Officer Marty Moe, who credits a “super premium experience” for attracting large brands like Ford, BMW and Microsoft. The Verge is one of three sites where Vox Media has applied its strategy of choosing a news vertical and then hitting it hard with sizeable staffs of specialist writers and elaborate publishing tools. The company’s other properties are sports site SB Nation and newly launched video game site Polygon.

After teasing the site’s arrival for months, Vox finally launched Polygon on Wednesday night. The site is a soup-to-nuts source for video game news, covering
everything from hardcore gamer staples like Call of Duty to casual mobile fare like Words with Friends. Polygon will also feature human interest stories about developers and players and even offer long-form journalism. The site has Vox’s typically elegant layout – here’s a screenshot:

“Video games have always been defined by change and right now we’re living in the middle of the most rapid change in video game history with mobile gaming, social gaming and web gaming, said Editor in Chief Chris Grant, in a phone interview.

Grant, who used to edit popular game blog Joystiq, says there is a lack of mature press coverage for what is now a $25 billion industry. He adds the audience for video game news is far more diverse than the stoned Halo players we may remember from college — a Polygon reader is more likely to be a young woman or a 39 year old lawyer than a couch-ridden burnout.

If Vox is betting that gaming is a large audience, it’s probably right. In the past, the company has shown no appetite for nibbling at the edges of a topic but instead prefers to go all-in with a big investment in staff and its Cadillac-like publishing platform known as Chorus (at paidContent 2012, CEO Jim Bankoff compared the platform to Lucas Films studios which George Lucas created in order to make Star Wars possible). Vox used this “go big” approach with The Verge which, in less than a year, has become a force in tech reporting.

Polygon managing editor Justin McElroy says the site also hopes to attract non-gamer readers with “people centric” stories. These include the tale of a couple who got married after meeting in a game video or, more darkly, a game developer who let his profession wreck his relationship.

Polygon is certainly thinking big, but who will pay for its fancy new canvas? Chief Content Officer Marty Moe says the site has already attracted premium advertisers from inside and outside the industry — Sony, Microsoft, Geico and so on. And as is the norm with media properties these days, Moe says Polygon also expects substantial revenue from off-line activities (read: events).

The Polygon launch means Vox now possesses mega-properties in three fields: tech, sports (SB Nation) and now gaming. This raises the question of whether Vox will use its formidable resources to scoop up another news domain such as health, fashion or food. In our phone interview, Moe said its existing three coverage areas were vast in themselves and left the company with plenty of room to grow — no new properties soon, in other words. He also said Vox has no plans to license its prized platform.

(Image by auremar via Shutterstock)

Moe, SVP for AOL Money & Finance, News & Sports, has worked out of the company’s Dulles office since he arrived at AOL in November 2001. Along with Wilson, he helped start AOL on its current strategy of producing professional content and presenting it in blog-like settings.

While Moe has continued to help craft the strategy to include the freelance aggregation site Seed, as well as the hyperlocal property Patch, those two projects are already set in their direction. The company has already announced it plans to add an ambitious 400 hyperlocal sites to Patch over the next six months, bringing its total to 500.

In a message that went out to AOL staffers earlier said Moe will stay on through October and that AOL would seek a replacement. Below is the message in full:

——————————————————————————–

Our colleague and long-time AOLer, Marty Moe, has decided to step down from his role leading our News & Information area. Marty, a nine-year veteran of the company, was one of the original champions of opening up AOL’s content and products to all users on the web at large as the company transitioned to an ad-supported media business.

More recently, Marty was a driving force behind helping AOL move away from aggregating third party content and moving toward the creation of high quality original content.

In talking with Marty, I know that he is eager to take on new challenges and also find more time to spend with his family. Marty is going to be transitioning with us through early October. In the meantime we will be looking for someone to fill his role. …

– Gutters: Are the panel members — whose companies are sometimes referred to as “content farms” — driving the value of content to the “gutter?” Colo: No; “We’re adding value by allowing quality freelancers.” Moe: No; “Models are varying widely. A hybrid of full-time employment and freelance work.” Irvine: No; “We are absolutely uninterested in producing cheap content. We invest heavily in ‘guide’ selection and training.” Campbell: No; “We’re the last ones to want to destroy anyone’s content model.” Keane: No; “We are not a news site. We are not journalists. But we’re democratic and open.”

– AOL’s Seed: A contradiction in AOL’s strategy? On the one hand, it’s hiring big-name journalists but it’s also facilitating freelancers with Seed. Moe responds: “Seed is a platform and tool for us to scale the journalism we want to bring to market. We see it as an enabling platform to produce the highest quality journalism we can.”

– Salaries: AOL’s payments are “all over the map;” About.com’s ‘guides’ typically start off by making between $6 and $1,200 a month on average make between $675 and $1,200 per month during their first two years; Associated Content says it pays its contributors between $1 and $2.50 per 1,000 page views, in addition to other payments; Discovery’s HowStuffWorks says it “can’t afford” to pay low wages.

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At the same time, SBNation continues to flex its local muscles through a content partnership with AOL’s Fanhouse: SBNation has added a feed from Fanhouse to give it more heft, while Fanhouse is going to pick up SBNation to add local coverage to its national spin.

As is the case with so many strategic partnerships, money isn’t involved and it’s non-exclusive. Fanhouse has more traffic — AOL (NYSE: TWX) says about 10-to-11 million uniques depending on the month, while SBNation claims 7.5 million uniques across its network — and the AOL firehose to tap into. But AOL’s Marty Moe, SVP of MediaGlow, suspects the overlap is minimal and the traffic exchange will be incremental.

He also doesn’t see any competition with SBNation’s national ambitions: “The direction we’re going in is to be among the premier national brands for high-quality premium sports journalism.” That’s why AOL has emphasized building a staff of strong national correspondents. (Today the site adds Thomas George, a veteran football writer for the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) and NFL.com.) He adds, “What makes [SBNation] engaging and unique is that it’s a blogger network with intense fans that are writing. Each has a different appeal.”