Lindsay Ederheimer is Director, Consumer Revenue at The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.
I was humbled on a recent Sunday afternoon by a phone notification informing me of my weekly screentime report. I’m not brave enough to share what my total time was (that will stay between me and Apple), but it was yet another reminder of how often I’m glued to my phone. On the bright side, I can at least defend the minutes I spent in the New Yorker app playing our newest daily word game, Shuffalo.
That moment got me thinking about what actually feels worth the time I spend on my phone, and why games have become such an important part of what we do at The New Yorker.
Digital games are becoming ubiquitous for publishers and users alike. Everyone from The New York Times to LinkedIn have invested in games as a way to grow, engage, and retain audiences.
And while games are having a moment across the industry, this isn’t about following a trend. Here at The New Yorker, puzzles are an extension of the magazine’s ethos, offering readers a thoughtful, lightly challenging pastime that rewards curiosity. On the heels of Shuffalo’s launch in early November, our consumer team recently revamped our entire paywall strategy for our puzzles and games offerings. Here’s how we did it.
The big picture & sizing the opportunity
The New Yorker first introduced crossword puzzles online in 2018. By the time the mini crossword launched in 2024, we were publishing 5 puzzles a week of varying difficulties on the website and in the app. We made small paywall rule adjustments over the years, but until this most recent strategy overhaul, all puzzles were free to play.
Beyond crosswords, two other games existed in our suite. Laugh Lines is a weekly cartoon history game, prompting users to guess when iconic cartoons from our hundred-year-old archive were originally published. Name Drop is a timed trivia game where players guess notable figures. Most recently, both of these games were free to play on the website, and hard-paywalled in the app.
A few key metrics let us know that our puzzles & games suite were key engagement drivers and ripe with opportunity for growth:
- The games section consistently ranks in the top three categories for engaged minutes across the site.
- The average time spent per user on crossword puzzle pages sits at twenty-five minutes.
- The games section drives hundreds of thousands of players each month, with well over half of the audience coming to us directly, rather than through Search or Referral traffic. This also signals that puzzles are uniquely insulated from news cycle shifts and off-platform algorithm changes.
The data was clear: Even getting 1% of our free puzzle-playing audience to convert to a subscriber had great revenue potential. However, it’s also clear there’s a loyal audience of puzzle players who may be turned off by an abrupt hard paywall. Balancing subscription growth and user engagement was a key consideration in our strategy.
Users behave differently while playing a game versus reading an article. Our journalism is at the heart of what we do at The New Yorker–and while our goal is to offer a premium games experience for readers, they require a different sampling approach. As such, separating our paywall rules for our games versus the rest of the site content was a vital part of our strategy. Having a games-specific paywall campaign also grants us the liberty to test different paywall copy without interrupting our regular meter treatment on the rest of the site.
Aligning on a strategy and path forward
The key project owners across Editorial, Aud Dev, and Consumer Marketing established a core strategy to bring to other cross-functional stakeholders. Beyond separating our regular site paywall from our games paywall, the concept of a windowed hardgate felt like a natural first step. A windowed hardgate meant that users could play the most recent 7 days of puzzles for free, with older puzzles fully behind a paywall.
This approach works well for a few reasons:
- It’s a way to “soft launch” a paywall without frustrating loyal users. It also enables us to get an initial read on engagement metrics as we consider other conversion levers. For example, the “7-day” gating rule could be opened or tightened to say, 3 days or 14 days, if we want to test more options down the road.
- Based on our publishing schedule, users can still play up to 5 crosswords (3 full, 2 minis) in a week’s time, ensuring users can still sample our puzzles. Plus, loyal users who are playing “archive” puzzles (any puzzle published more than 7 days ago) are at a higher propensity to subscribe anyway.
- By leaving many of our games free to play in the app, we can incentivize app downloads for users who may not be ready to subscribe just yet. Getting a user to take the action of downloading our app and creating an account is a tall order in the first place. The more users who at least download the app and build a daily habit of playing are more likely to subscribe down the road.
- Keeping our full archive of puzzles as a subscriber-only benefit makes our digital value proposition even stronger, and adds to all the great benefits of being a subscriber. At The New Yorker, we want to give our subscribers a premium experience, which includes giving them access to all games in our archive.
Measuring success and planning for the future
There are plenty of ways to measure success here. In an ideal world, engagement stays steady (or better yet, improves, at least among active subscribers) and we see a sizable lift in subscriptions from our puzzles. Here are the core KPIs we’re tracking beyond pure subscription growth:
Conversion rate on games-specific pages (compared to our standard site conversion rate), individual puzzles (i.e. crosswords vs Name Drop), and on our hardgated games (any archive puzzles), where we expect to see the most lift.
Paywall hit rate, especially on our hardgated archive games. Considering we didn’t consistently have a paywall on crosswords, we know the percentage of users who hit the paywall will rise significantly. Tracking paywall hit rate over time will signal user interest in playing older puzzles.
Engagement through time spent and average minutes played. Our goal is to mitigate dips in engagement as much as possible.
Repeat visitation on site and in-app, broken out by subscribers and non-subscribers.
Ultimately, our priority every day is to offer our readers a premium experience worth paying for. As our paywall approach evolves and our suite of games expands, we hope that every minute our readers spend with The New Yorker earns its place in that weekly screen-time report.
