The New York Times hit $1 billion in annual subscriptions, with games now consuming over 50% of user time on the platform, surpassing news. Games like Wordle and daily crosswords drive this shift, though the Times limits engagement to one puzzle per day instead of chasing endless play.
The New York Times is a games company. The numbers behind the New York Times and their gaming products is pretty amazing. And what's the revenue on that? Take a guess. $100 million? Just in Q4, their digital-only subscribers was $289 million, which is most shares. It's a little bit of their cooking product as well, but it's like mostly their games revenue. Gaming basically has pushed their annual subscriptions over $1 billion a year for the first time ever. A few years ago, games was roughly 15% of time spent. Now it's over 50% of the time spent is on the games product. It has overtaken news. And what's cool about it is almost every game on my phone is just trying to like, how do I take all of your time and all of your money? And the New York Times thing works way different. It's, you have one a day. There's one mini crossword a day, one crossword a day, one Wordle a day. Should we just start calling the New York Times a gaming company? Yeah, exactly.
