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Remember when John Kraskinski started Some Good News channel early in the pandemic and it seemed pure and well meaning for about a month before it got sold to CBS and we never heard about it again? Wordle just got sold to the New York Times. A mere week ago, we covered an interview that creator Josh Wardle did with Salon Magazine. He said he created the popular word game to play with his partner and that he didn’t want it to have ads, push notifications or even a link back to the site with the shareable score grid because that felt “spammy.” Enter the New York Times, which bought the game for a “low seven figures” and promises not to put it behind a paywall – for the time being.
The sudden hit Wordle, in which once a day players get six chances to guess a five-letter word, has been acquired by The New York Times Company.
The purchase, announced by The Times on Monday, reflects the growing importance of games, like crosswords and Spelling Bee, in the company’s quest to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025.
Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” The Times said. The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.
Wordle — the name is a cheeky pun on its creator’s name — has had a striking rise. It first appeared on a no-frills, ad-free website in October, and had 90 users on Nov. 1. That number grew to 300,000 by the middle of this month, and now millions play the game daily, according to the Times announcement.
The rest of the article is business talk about how well The NY Times is doing financially. A lot of Twitter users are pointing out that The NY Times has been union busting and that workers had to strike to get raises recently. This is disappointing, but not surprising. It’s completely understandable that Wardle cashed in on the success of his game. In his statement explaining the sale (below) he said that he couldn’t keep up with the popularity of the game and wanted it to grow. The NY Times, as garbage as it’s been about both-sidesing fascism, does have great word games. What a shame, I heard Wordle was just getting popular on Facebook.
Oh and Wordle has an official app now. I saw an ad for it on TikTok featuring Jimmy Fallon.
An update on Wordle
— Josh Wardle (@powerlanguish) January 31, 2022
the @nytimes spent “low seven figures” to acquire wordle, meanwhile @wirecutterunion had to strike to get $300k worth of raises for ~70 people
— Andrew Cunningham (@AndrewWrites) January 31, 2022
I have never seen twitter as immediately mad as it is rn about the NYT wordle buyout. the NYT took one nice and simple thing that a lot of people really liked, a dumb bit of fun in our exhaustingly dark times, and implied that they’ll stick it behind a paywall. exhausting.
— srečko kosovel fan (@mcmansionhell) January 31, 2022
The New York Times bought Wordle. Here's an exclusive inside look at the gameplay of the first answer they've chosen.
— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) January 31, 2022
Prescient
WATCH: Trump plays Wordle on Laura Ingraham's Fox News show in Saturday Night Live opener
— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 23, 2022
Header photo credit: Bruce Mars via Unsplash
