Wordle brought “tens of millions” of new users to the New York Times

First-quarter financial results from the New York Times Company prove what we have known all along: people really like Wordle.

By now, you know the story. Josh Wardle made a fun little word game for his partner, shared it with some friends, who were influential tech people, who shared it with some more friends, and eventually, it was all anyone with an internet.

Wardle wasn't trying to profit from his word game at first. At the end of January, he sold the game to the New York Times for an undisclosed amount.

If you've followed along with the story of Wordle, you'll know that NYT games play a big part in its origins and so this step feels very natural to me.

The New York Times announced today that Wordle brought an unprecedented tens of millions of new users to the paper. The New York Times has been covertly advertising its other games through Wordle. A New York Times Games subscription costs between $5 and $40 a year.

New York Times Games was an inspiration for the game according to Wardle. The game is not addicting since you cannot play more than once a day. The game design is intentional.

He said that he and his partner play a lot of The New York Times word games.

Wordle is similar to The Times in that players solve the same puzzle. One thing that is interesting to think about, though, is that Wordle could be one a day, but if everybody was getting a different word on that day, you could still only play one.

The ease of sharing your Wordle results is what propelled Wordle to an unexpected level of virality.

People share their Wordle results in chats, Facebook posts and texts to their mom, but the popularity of the micro-messaging service DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch DropCatch

A case study about how Wordle spread on the platform was published yesterday.

The study shows that 3.3 million people have followed Wordle since mid-October. Wordle has earned over 6 trillion views, 58 million likes, and 9 million replies.

The New York Times purchase of the game contributed to the discourse, but at its peak in popularity, there were 500,000 tweets about Wordle per day. Even though there is a downward trend in the number of Wordle posts, that doesn't mean people aren't playing as much. It may have become a bit too much to share your scores every day.

According to Wardle, the majority of players are not posting their results on social media.

According to the sample size of people who posted Wordle results, the hardest word was SWILL, which took an average of almost five guesses to solve. The easiest was PLANT, which was solved on average in 3.32 guesses.

Wordle founder Josh Wardle on going viral and what comes next

Wordle! (but not that Wordle!) is now in the hands of mobile tech firm AppLovin