NYT Gaming Subscription Success

A story about how The New York Times has transformed into a gaming company, with games becoming their largest engagement driver.

"The New York Times has more in common with Zynga than it does with the truth. The Times is a games company - their digital-only subscribers generated $289 million in Q4, mostly from their games revenue. Their gaming has pushed their annual subscriptions over $1 billion for the first time ever.

They released a chart showing the New York Times bundle - news, cooking section, the Athletic, and games. A few years ago, games was roughly 15% of time spent. Now it's over 50% of the time spent in their bundle. Games has overtaken news.

What's fascinating is they used to just have a little crossword section and sudoku in the newspaper. As they transformed the product, they unbundled it and made it standalone. Almost every game on phones tries to take all your time and money, but the Times works differently - you get one mini crossword a day, one crossword a day, one Wordle a day. The mini crossword literally takes under 1 minute.

They've basically taken this remnant asset they weren't using - decades of old crossword puzzles - and turned it into a viable asset. They modernized it, put it in an app, made it super simple, and it breathed new life into the company. The company has grown like crazy because of it."