On Wordle, the NYT, and Antitrust

https://semiotech.substack.com/p/wordle

58 61 4 years ago

semiotech.substack.com

Definitely thought it was ironic the NYT bought a “competitor” after constantly complaining about big tech doing it over the years.

cwxm• 4 years ago

not to mention their dual class stock structure.

JohnWhigham• 4 years ago

They never get called out on it because the overwhelmingly liberal media all read it (don't downvote me, you know this to be unequivocally true). It's as simple as that. Everything has fucking turned political.

mindslight• 4 years ago

What additional insight is created by beating this strawman "liberal", beyond just straightforwardly saying that the media is biased towards its own entrenched power which is intrinsically true and relevant to the topic at hand?

tablespoon2• 4 years ago

Definitely thought it was ironic the NYT bought a “competitor” after constantly complaining about big tech doing it over the years.

You shouldn't conflate the New York Times Company with the people who write articles for the New York Times (or even its editorial board). They're not the same entity. Apologies if somehow that's not actually what you're doing, but my experience is when someone talks about the "NYT complaining" they're pretty much always talking about a general impression of its opinion pages.

zeroonetwothree3• 4 years ago

Social media gets constantly criticized for views expressed by individuals on their platforms (often by NYT or other media!). Why shouldn't we be able to do the same to traditional media companies?

dantheman• 4 years ago

Don't complain about what others do, when thats how you get paid. Get your house in order first.

DerekL• 4 years ago

The NYT Crossword isn't dominant in its industry, unless you define their industry to be ridiculously small. I'd say their industry is video games, or maybe just puzzle video games.

For instance, this article, https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/400000-people-now-subscribe..., says that they had 400,000 digital subscribers in 2019. That's at most $33M/year, plus they also get some ad revenue. But Candy Crush Saga made $1.2B in 2021.

The NYT Crossword is also available in the newspaper and books, but this probably doesn't earn that much more than the electronic version.

zwieback• 4 years ago

I'm not super happy NYT bought Wordle but I wouldn't go so far as saying that Wordle might "threaten the NYT crossword puzzle", I don't think something like Wordle requires the kind of highly visible editing the NYT crossword does.

I think they just saw a good opportunity to get a bunch of new subscribers. Which is kind of weird because Wordle is super easy to reproduce, evidently.

xeromal• 4 years ago

I think the NYT just wanted the name. They could build a clone if they wanted.

bydo• 4 years ago

Paying the creator was also the classy thing to do. Spending "low seven figures" is not a big deal for the NYT financially, but it's a significant token of goodwill (well, to everyone other than the author of this article).

I prefer Kottke's take:

https://kottke.org/22/02/wordle-sold-to-the-ny-times-and-tha...

keithnz• 4 years ago

Given the thing of value is the amount of people hitting the website, you'd want to leverage that to promote whatever you want to promote, locking it behind a paywall would instantly kill the visitors and more than likely everyone would just scatter and go find a clone (or move on to something else)

gringoDan• 4 years ago

The NYT's main competitors aren't other newspapers. Their competitors are Substack, Candy Crush, and Netflix.

As Byrne Hobart points out,

"in their latest quarter almost 30% of their new digital subscriptions were for games, cooking, and Wirecutter, rather than news."

And a bit more cheekily:

"When there's a negative New York Times article about a startup, one of the not-uncommon Tech Twitter jokes is that this constitutes bullying from an established, profitable unicorn with over $1bn in annual recurring revenue."

https://www.thediff.co/p/the-nyt-dead-trees-and-disruption (paywall)

bigmattystyles• 4 years ago

It still blows my mind that you have to pay for Wirecutter nowadays. They ultimately end their articles with an affiliate link to their recommendation. I guess perhaps requiring a paid subscription quells any question of incentives, as in they're in it for the subscription money rather than the affiliate links. Still, it's odd, you could say the same thing about Consumer Reports but for some reason, I don't equate them in my mind - maybe it's because of how Wirecutter came up and the fact they have a deals page. Ultimately though it doesn't matter. I'll never subscribe to any NYT service again until they make it easy to cancel. Talk about dark pattern... yeesh.

joegahona• 4 years ago

Wirecutter has a pretty generous paywall -- I think 10 articles.

one_off_comment• 4 years ago

I agree with the spirit of this piece, but I think Wordle is a weird choice to try to highlight the point. I enjoy Wordle, but I'm certainly not going to die without it. Not to downplay Wardle, but, as xeromal pointed out, it's pretty easy to crank out a clone. Lots of people already have. If NYT paywalls it, I'll either stop playing or find or create a clone.

ChrisLTD2• 4 years ago

As a society, we want to properly incent smart people to build useful things.

The author of the piece needs to help bridge us from his proposal to "re-examine the way we make rules around tech M&A", and how Mr. Wardle would have been compensated for his work.

omnicognate6• 4 years ago

I don't blame him in the slightest for taking the money - I would have too - but Mr. Wardle didn't need to be compensated for his "work". He wrote it as a (beautifully crafted) bit of fun, with no desire for or expectation of payment. You couldn't wish for a clearer demonstration of the fallacy of assuming nobody will create anything unless they're "incentivised" to do so.

It wasn't work, it was play.

imgabe3• 4 years ago

He wrote it for one person. He didn’t ask to be the focus of millions of people’s attention. Even if that attention is mostly positive that is a lot to deal with just in the sheer volume of messages, let alone the possibility of unhinged people thinking he wants to marry them or that he’s sending them coded messages in Wordle or whatever.

Even if it's simple to host with that much traffic it's bound to be a headache. Forget to renew your SSL certificate and the site is inaccessible for 5 minutes? Great, now you've got 10,000 angry emails in your inbox.

I don’t blame him for wanting to get out of the spotlight and let someone else take the responsibility. Creating it may have been play, but keeping it going and dealing with the expectations of a huge fanbase is definitely work.

throwaway889900• 4 years ago

Nothing different than Flappy Bird honestly. Cash out on minimum effort and everyone will forget eventually.

originalvichy• 4 years ago

The worst case of this I’ve seen was the iOS game Threes. Cool and original idea (to me) on a puzzle game. Even had an art style that was carefully crafted and audio lines from the game devs friends. It started gaining steam among puzzle fans. I think it cost 3-4€ as a one time purchase in the app store.

What happened next?

Someone released a free version called 2048 that ripped off the idea, made the number 3 based puzzle use the number 2, made the game less challenging and might have even made it use ads at the bottom of the screen.

Because Wordle was already free there wasn’t a chance for this kind of douchebag move. NYT as an established brand would face criticism if they cloned the game based on its current popularity (the idea for worlde apparently is not original).

NYT did this by the book in my opinion. I think the writer ks just connecting the two for easy points.

adam• 4 years ago

Many lament the downfall of traditional media then crucify them when they creatively explore new opportunities for themselves.

Should the "Gray Lady" have just stubbornly continued to print its papers until it was bought up by the same PE vipers who have destroyed countless other newspaper companies?

I applaud them for establishing other opportunities for themselves to survive and thrive. IMHO, the NY Times is not the enemy here.

jmull3• 4 years ago

Casting Wordle as a NYT competitor squashed by acquisition is pretty stupid.

Wordle hadn't even been turned into an on-going business, and Wardle apparently had no interest in doing so. There wasn't even a squint-and-imagine-the-future potential competitor here, even just considering NYTs game business.

Yes, at some point you're going to have to pay for Wordle, through a subscription and/or viewing ads or make do with a crappy knockoff. Like everything else. This isn't anyone's first day on the internet, is it? If so, sorry to break it to you.

ChrisLTD2• 4 years ago

I think that's part of the author's point. These acquisitions happen early enough that it's not clear whether or not Instagram, Wordle, etc. would be competitive businesses.

However, I don't want to work in a regulatory environment that says I can't sell my small business to some larger company on the off chance it might some day be significant on its own.

paulryanrogers• 4 years ago

Perhaps there is a company size which is just too big to make acquisitions because the risk of stifling competition is too great. Or make any purchases of companies in markets that don't have enough competition.

jmull3• 4 years ago

Yeah that’s the author’s argument. That’s why I called it stupid.

The idea of forestalling competition by buying non-competitors doesn’t make any sense at all. NYT would have to buy all kinds of things, spending orders of magnitudes more money than they have.

I have a non-business game… is there any question why the NYT isn’t offerings me low-seven figures for it?

runako• 4 years ago

Instagram had raised nearly $60mm* and had 13 employees when it was sold. Wordle was a single person, part-time. They are not remotely similar for the purposes of antitrust discussion.

*Do people still know that this is a lot of money, and that most companies are not able to raise this much capital?

IanCal• 4 years ago

The creator didn't want to monetise it themselves, and wasn't really intended as a global phenomenon so this seems like a great option for them.

Also I wouldn't be shocked if NYT keep it free. They have some free word games, and encourage you to sign up for the rest of them - having a huge audience that come and play word games every single day seems like a great opportunity for upselling.

edit - a quick search suggests it's millions of people per day. At £25/year for a subscription, you'd probably not need a huge conversion rate for it to pay off quickly.

ncmncm• 4 years ago

Joke's on the NYT: anybody can put up a Wordle work-alike. And will, the moment NYT puts it behind a paywall.

micromacrofoot• 4 years ago

You think the NYT spent seven figures without knowing this? they’re paying for the name

Splendor• 4 years ago

There are lots of places to play sudoku and crosswords for free too. Yet people are happy to pay the NYT for those games. Why wouldn't the same be true of this game?

imgabe3• 4 years ago

Sudoku is pretty generic, but crosswords have an element of authorship that is important. Writing a good crossword puzzle takes talent and skill and the people making crosswords for the NY Times are going to be better than most people probably.

kzrdude• 4 years ago

There are lots of copies already

fleddr• 4 years ago

Wordle is the copy. It's Lingo.

quxpar• 4 years ago

People are missing the point - NYT paid to have THE wordle of the day - talking to other people about your specific battle with that day's word was 99 percent of the fun.

The act of whipping up a quick clone, while a a balm to the ego and a fun exercise for junior devs, does not recreate the social phenomenon.

dTal• 4 years ago

I note that all future Wordle words are already known, so it would be trivial to make a "compatible" Wordle.

omnicognate6• 4 years ago

Trivial and, presumably, illegal.

notjustanymike• 4 years ago

Exactly. They paid a million bucks for the free marketing and built in audience. They're buying the audience.

ppljudge• 4 years ago

I always remember that article where people said the new companies and ideas wouldn’t come from garages anymore. Looks like a single HTML game is a huge success now

JohnHaugeland• 4 years ago

wordle is a game that can be cloned in 20 minutes, and frequently is

worrying about that as an anti-trust issue is beyond the pale

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

Meanwhile, Microsoft buys up all of Activision-Blizzard and Sony buys Bungie and no one blinks an eye. No one even noticed that Zynga just got bought by Take-Two within the past month!

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

I bet the Wordle author is wiping his tears with hundred dollar bills over the viciousnous of capitalism.

madarco• 4 years ago

No, NYT bought the NFT of Wordle

marstall2• 4 years ago

They're not paying for wordle, the game - obviously that's been cloned a million times over (and it's a clone itself).

They're paying for the viral social network around Wordle.

My family has a group chat where we brag about our Wordle results and discuss our strategies every single day. It's a nice way to connect with my adult siblings. I can only imagine how many other groups like ours exist.

Wouldn't the NYT like to capture that kind of energy within their Games offering, within all their offerings?

It will take finesse for the NYT to land that energy as a profit-making service that drives growth, but that's a challenge they've got to take on, and if anyone in the news industry can do it, it's them.

Great investment at a fire-sale price. Viral concepts like this are 1 in a million.

culpable_pickle• 4 years ago

Can you link the original that wordle cloned?

marstall2• 4 years ago

I can't find the article I first read about this in but the Wordle wikipedia page mentions a couple of antecedents with near-identical gameplay, including a TV game show called Lingo ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle

On Wordle, the NYT, and Antitrust

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