New York Pastimes
While historically it might be better known for producing hard-hitting long reads and ground-breaking exposés, the New York Times is currently enjoying a wave of success and boosted earnings thanks to some slightly more fun offerings, with its games and puzzles played over 8 billion times in 2023.
That mind-boggling figure is largely thanks to its star acquisition Wordle, for which it paid just $3 million a little under 2 years ago — the 5-letter-word-guessing game was played some 4.8 billion times last year, as daily players still won’t surrender their streaks on the lexicon-testing hit.
