The New York Times is looking to aggressively expand advertising across its products
Ever since The New York Times acquired the hit internet game Wordle, everyone’s been waiting with bated breath to see how the newspaper would ruin the game by aggressively monetizing it or filling it with advertising. After all, the paper didn’t pay seven figures to the game’s creator Josh Wardle just to continue offering the game for free. Well, thanks to a new report from Axios, we now know The New York Times plans to expand its advertising aggressively across its products, with games as a focus, which means Wordle may soon see advertising added to the title beyond the NYT games that started popping up in small banner ads in April, with the only saving grace being that the paper acknowledges it will have to tread carefully while testing its new advertising push.
Essentially, The New York Times has hit critical mass for its subscribers, which means it needs to find new ways to pull in money, and so the company is looking to aggressively expand its advertising across its bundled products and is already testing and experimenting with ideas. Games and cooking are a focus as these two sections account for 1 million subscribers (out of 9 million across all NYT’s subscription properties). Thankfully the company acknowledges that its number one priority is to ensure the ads won’t be disruptive.
Despite acknowledging subscribers are currently at critical mass, the big push into the future for the NYT is to diversify into newer and newer products, much like this year’s acquisition of Wordle, which has already proven to bring in more subscribers to the paper, and so the company is shooting to reach 15 million subs by 2027, a lofty goal compared to its current 9 million. So not only is diversification through new content a focus but monetizing that content is assuredly a goal to expand income.
While it’s not surprising to learn The New York Times is already trying to figure out how to properly monetize Wordle after it already started advertising its own games in April, it would appear more ads are coming, but there’s a balance to be struck as angering users with too many ads could have the opposite effect, as the last thing any Wordle player wants is for Wordle to turn into yet another disgustingly monetized game to play on mobile. So here’s hoping The New York Times has the fortitude not to ruin a good thing with overambitious greed, as it’s done a good job so far by quietly adding valuable features like progress sync across devices.
