What’s a five-letter word for an activity that media and technology companies are increasingly relying on to attract subscribers and keep them coming back?
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Apple released a series of word-oriented puzzles on its subscription messaging service last fall. LinkedIn, a company owned by Microsoft, introduced a series of puns this spring. News sites such as Morning Brew, The Washington Post, Vox Media and The Boston Globe have added new puzzles beyond the crossword and hired staff to work on games. The publication you are reading has also invested in a collection of brain teasers.
It’s not all fun and games. For media companies, games are a way to attract new customers as their sites face declining traffic from Google, X and Meta, which are moving away from emphasizing news. For tech companies with editorial offerings, the puzzles are a way to attract new subscribers while engaging existing users who may not return to the apps on a daily basis.
“A publication is more than the stories it produces. It’s an experience to look forward to, a pleasure,” said John Temple, a former journalist and co-founder of Amuse Labs, which sells a software platform that helps publishers create puzzles. “You want to give people the same satisfying experience they might have had for years solving a crossword puzzle in the newspaper.”
Adding games and puzzles has become a central part of many publishers’ strategies in recent years, with momentum picking up sharply in recent months with the entry of Apple and LinkedIn. These news and technology companies are vying for consumers’ attention with competitors like Netflix, Spotify and others in digital entertainment are likely to be followed by others.
Many of the games aren’t Call of Duty-like shoot-em-ups or the next Angry Birds. These are often word or logic puzzles that can give people a feeling of accomplishment because they’ve exercised their intellectual muscles. Even for companies with editorial products, word games do not differ significantly from their core business.
There are early signs that the games are working. At The New York Times, new subscriptions to non-news products – including subscriptions to Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic – outpaced new subscriptions to core news offerings in the first quarter. (The Times doesn’t provide numbers just for game subscriptions.) Apple and LinkedIn said, without providing details, that early results were promising.
Publishers have a long tradition of adding games to their news offerings. For more than a century, newspapers contained puns and brain teasers. The New York World published the first crossword puzzle on its “Fun” page on December 21, 1913.
An exception was The Times, which advertised itself as “solely a newspaper for intelligent, thoughtful people.” That changed after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged the United States into World War II. Times editors said that because of the intense news environment, readers may want a distraction from the relentlessly gloomy headlines. In February 1942, the Times introduced its first crossword puzzle, which became the newspaper’s trademark.
Publishers and technology platforms are finding the news cycle just as challenging today, with wars in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the upcoming US presidential election and associated culture wars. News and technology executives have tried to provide at least some refuge, however brief, from the seemingly endless stream of bad news.
“News and current events are often characterized by things that are persistent,” said Ross Trudeau, the mystery editor at Apple News. “Puzzles are a way of saying that there are solutions to some of these problems—even elegant ones.”
(Mr. Trudeau comes from a lineage of real media figures. His parents are Garry Trudeau, best known for the comic strip “Doonesbury,” and Jane Pauley, the television news anchor and journalist.)
The Times had groundbreaking games beyond its crossword puzzle. These include homegrown creations like Spelling Bee, in which users create as many words as possible using a handful of letters, and Connections, in which users group a series of words that have a similar link. In 2022, The Times purchased Wordle, a word puzzle game that was a surprise hit, from its creator, a Reddit engineer. The game went viral as people shared their Wordle results on social media.
Others have noticed. Last fall, Apple debuted a daily series of crossword puzzles for subscribers to Apple News+, its paid subscription service that curates articles from partner publishers. (The Times left the program in 2020.) Last month, Apple introduced a spelling game, Quartiles, in which users spell words based on a jumbled series of fragmented word tiles.
“The more value we add to Apple News+, the more subscribers we gain, which benefits our publishing partners,” said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News. Apple has also integrated Apple News+ puzzles into its gaming social network Games Center, where users can compete with friends for the best scores.
LinkedIn followed with three puzzle games prominently featured on the website and mobile apps. Dan Roth, editor-in-chief at LinkedIn, said the goal is to keep the content consistent with the company’s “professional network” brand while giving people a reason to return regularly and engage with the site both publicly and privately to participate in conversations.
“One of the main goals of LinkedIn is to get people on the site, to share the knowledge they have in their minds with their network,” Mr. Roth said in an interview. “Sometimes you need to prime the pump to get people to start sharing, and adding games is a clear way to achieve that.”
The companies said their approach to developing games started with people. Apple praised its diverse team of puzzle creators and contributors for reaching a broader audience and said it tried to avoid crossword jargon in puzzle clues.
LinkedIn hired Paolo Pasco, a longtime crossword puzzle creator and recent Harvard graduate, as its first games editor. The Times highlighted its games team by showing the often low-tech process of handwriting and crafting the site’s most popular puzzles.
All of these companies are about instilling new habits in consumers. That’s especially true for new casual customers, who may include games in their apps but hope to stick around long enough to introduce them to other products like podcasts, sports — and even hard news.
“When we see subscribers interacting with both games and news in a week, we see some of the best long-term subscriber retention in that pattern,” said Jonathan Knight, head of games at The Times. “So we do a lot of things to encourage this behavior.
Many companies said people should feel good about visiting the apps, even if it’s just the fleeting but satisfying moment of completing a personal-best crossword puzzle.
“It’s time well spent and you decide how it fits into your life,” Mr. Knight said. “You do one puzzle a day. Put it down and move on to the next one if you want. It’s a real sense of achievement and people can feel good about it.”
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2024-06-11 15:40:07
www.nytimes.com
