The site already has a forum for Spelling Bee, which Knight said gets “over 1,000 comments a day” and is one of the most-trafficked pages on The New York Times’ website. “This month we’re going to be launching something called the Wordle Review, which is like a daily forum on our gameplay vertical on where people can go after they solve the Wordle and engage with the community, talk about the previous day’s word.” In the meantime, the company has begun building out an editorial offering around its games. If you were to ask me about the Mini or Spelling Bee or any other game, I’d give the same answer. I always get myself into a little bit of trouble with my hesitation around that question. “I mean, you never say never with these things. “At the moment, we’re pretty focused on driving people to create New York Times accounts so that they can capture their stats and streaks,” Knight said. Like the Times’ Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee puzzles, Wordle does not require a Times subscription to access. The puzzle was quickly acquired by the NYT for a price “in the low seven figures”, becoming the ninth game in the paper’s stable. Its intuitive gameplay, combined with a mechanism that let users share their performance on social media without spoiling the answer, helped Wordle to viral fame at the end of 2021. Wordle is a simple puzzle game that gives players six attempts to guess a five-letter word which changes each day. But its website added tens of millions of users all at once when, in January 2021, it bought Wordle. The NYT’s games have long had a following, with a crossword-only subscription first launching in 1997. And, yeah, we’re pretty pleased with the way that funnel works.” “They’re a great way for people to get introduced into games, to try them out, see if they like it at a low price. Knight said that even after those introductory offers elapse, the company was satisfied with the proportion of users sticking around. At time of writing, an all access subscription could be bought at $4 every four weeks (£2 in the UK) for the first year, down from the sticker price of $25 a month (or £12). Each is available as a subscription in its own right, and The New York Times says each of them except Wirecutter has more than a million standalone subscribers.īut they’re also available together as a bundle, which The New York Times is currently promoting through an introductory discount offer. Those other products are Cooking, sports journalism site The Athletic and product review service Wirecutter. Knight said: “What we’re seeing is that for subscribers, specifically if a subscriber is engaged with both news and games on a given week, they just have a much higher likelihood of retaining over a long period of time than news-only subscribers – and frankly, than pretty much any other combination of products in our offering.” But the Games offering also helps keep conventional news audiences with the Times. The NYT charges that offer at $5 a month (£3 in the UK) or $40 (£25) for a full year, and Knight said games-only is “an important audience for us”. But whereas under that model a puzzler was still buying the news product, today more than a million people subscribe to The New York Times’ games-only offer. Games have long been used by news brands to offer more value to readers: the Sunday Express became the first British newspaper to feature a crossword 99 years ago. “But increasingly, it’s this kind of constellation of products that surround the news – with the news being the sun in that analogy – and what we’re really finding is that we can just bring a lot more value to our subscribers, and engage them and retain them over longer periods of time, when we offer a suite of products.”
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