With Strands, the New York Times has found its next hit game

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CNN
—

Following the success of Connections and Wordle, the pressure was on for The New York Times to find its next hit game. There was no need to look far.

Strands, a word search game, officially joined the newspapers' games portfolio on Friday after a four-month testing phase in which it attracted millions of players despite being virtually hidden. The puzzle marks the latest in a string of successes for the Times Games section, which has helped grow the newspaper subscription business and strengthen its bottom line in an era of falling advertising revenue.

During the testing phase, Strands was only playable on the web or via links from its other games. Now that it is in beta testing, it will soon be added to the Times Games app, exposing it to millions of new players and joining the ten game app collection, which also includes Crossword, Spelling Bee and Soduku.

The strands got very big, very quickly. It was a bit bigger than we expected in the first few days, admitted Jonathan Knight, head of the Games at The Times. This is partly due to the continued popularity of Connections, which was the second largest referrer of Strands behind people searching for it, and still has millions of players.

“We're seeing the new games build on each other, so it's really exciting because our audience has grown quite significantly over the last couple of years,” he told CNN.

What are strands?

Strands, like Connections, recently hatched during a Game jam(think: a hackathon, but for games) and filled the need for a word search type game within the app. It came across as a version of a word search true to the New York Times games, Knight said.

THE Finding time of its subscribers have found that Wordle readers also solve word search games, making Strands a natural addition to its lineup. Notably, Strands also shares the same Wordle editor Tracy Bennett who, along with her team of editors and testers, creates the daily puzzles.

Strands is organized by a 6 x 8 grid of seemingly random letters with a category clue at the top. Players must find several words related to the theme. However, the Times' problem is that they also need to find the spanagram, which describes what all the words have in common.

Knight suggests players start at the corners of the puzzle and look for obvious words there. If you put one foot in the corner, you start the process of filling in the whole picture and it flows from there, he said. There is a wave of accomplishment at the end.

The solve rate is quite high, at 81% for Strands, due to the clues players receive if they guess three words with at least four letters that are not part of the theme. That's another part of the game, Knight said, because it challenges some people not to use the clues.

It should be really solvable for most people most of the time, he said, especially compared to Connections, which is deliberately much trickier.

Strands' simplicity is part of the games' strategy of offering a full range of puzzles for players to choose from, which may be easier at one end and more difficult at the other, Knight added. He noted that Wordle still remains its most popular game and was played 4.8 billion times last year.

Games and Times, other apps like Cooking have been a critical part of the Times' strategy to grow revenue beyond advertising. Digital subscription revenue surpassed $1 billion for the first time in 2023. The Times currently has 10.6 million digital-only subscribers and its games were played more than 8 billion times last year, according to its newspaper. Annual Report.

Games have helped the Times grow because news is a crowded category and the subscription market is limited, largely by ideology, and advertising for news is a declining market, Brian Morrissey, author of Rebooting, a media newsletterpreviously told CNN.

The success of the Times has prompted other companies, such as LinkedIn and Hearstto take note and start creating their own games.

Games have proven to be a powerful way to acquire new customers who might be open to a set of information but otherwise wouldn't subscribe to just the news, Morrissey added.

The Times Games app allows users to play some puzzles, like Wordle and Strands, for free. Full access, which includes crosswords, a few other games and archives, costs $6 per month. THE newly redesigned app has been downloaded 21 million times worldwide since 2019, according to data from Sensor Tower, with the number of downloads soaring 113% last year.

Growth continued in 2024, with the number of downloads increasing 165% in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period the previous year, the business information company told CNN.

But with that success comes some stress for Knight and his team to find the next Wordle, Connections or even Strands.

The bar is high now, he says. We have a number of high quality games in the app. As we move forward, we're certainly not done and we think there's room for more games, but we're even more thoughtful than ever.