The once-sacrosanct halls of Wordle are adding new ads. When you hit “Play” on the Wordle mobile app, you’ll now be treated to what advertising boys call an “interstitial” ad, meaning the video or the image takes up your entire screen.
The first company to take advantage of the ad spots is DoorDash, which will reportedly run a campaign offering a 75% discount code for first-time orders through mid-August.
“Advertising is an important contributor to our business, and will help us continue to provide a premium experience for users that is in line with our ad experience across Games and other New York Times products,” said a New York Times spokesperson. “Ads are currently appearing only on mobile, desktop and tablet web browsers. Games in the NYT News and Games app are currently ad-free.”
The change is part of a long, slow trek to turn Wordle into a cash machine. The New York Times bought the beloved puzzle game for over a million dollars in January, 2022, and quickly gave Wordle a slew of ad tracking technology. The Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a strange way, the New York Times should be thought of as much of a tech company as it is a news company. To name a single example, when the New York Times technology staff unionized in 2022, the Times Tech Guild immediately became the largest union of tech workers in the country. The news industry has been in a death spiral for years now, but the Times is an exception. Its revenue is on the rise, and the company even added 19,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2023. Much of the Times’ success comes from its efforts to revamp its technological systems, finding new ways to reach and please customers through its various websites, apps, podcasts, and newsletters.
This won’t be the first ads the Times is shoving into Wordle. The puzzle’s advertising made its debut last September with pitches for luggage brand Rimowa on the desktop version of the game, and the NYT uses the Wordle format to let advertisers make their own five-letter puzzles that display across the Times’ various products.
Update 07/07/2023, 1:26 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with a comment from the New York Times.
