Similarweb: The New York Times grew website visitors 52% YoY to 524.6M in May 2022, helped by Wordle, making the NYT the world's fastest growing top news site
Aisha Majid / Press Gazette : Tweets: @neomythos , @earleyedition , @adebradley , and @pressgazette See also Mediagazer Tweets: Vinay Shukla / @neomythos : Are they playing Wordle or reading NYT? https://twitter.com/... Dave Earley / @earleyedition : . @abcnews (17th) and @newscomauHQ (24th) the only Australian sites in the global top 50 most popular news websites in May https://pressgazette.co.uk/... @NYTimes 4th, up 52% YoY, @Guardian the 7th most visited news website globally (6th if you remove @googlenews) https://twitter.com/... Adrian Bradley / @adebradley : That's really fascinating. But how many are like me that do wordle but not anything else on the NYT website? https://twitter.com/... @pressgazette : The New York Times and Mail Online were the only top 10 news sites to see significant global growth in May https://pressgazette.co.uk/... https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The May 2022 traffic spike is the payoff of a deliberate consolidation move: weeks earlier, the NYT had the independent Wordle Archive taken down at its request, tightening its grip on the game just as it became the paper's biggest audience driver. The result was 524.6M monthly visitors and the top spot among growing news sites, ahead of the Guardian at seventh globally.
The pattern predates Wordle — NYT had already tripled digital-only subscribers since 2016 per earlier coverage, and its 2017-era strategy of luring readers through vertical apps set the template that puzzles now supercharge. The later confirmation that users played NYT games over 8B times in 2023 shows the May spike was a durable funnel, not a blip.
First-order effects
- The NYT enters June 2022 as the world's fastest-growing top news site, converting free daily Wordle players into an audience pool its subscription funnel can work on — while the Guardian and other top-50 outlets lose relative ground in the same rankings.
- Competitors now face a rankings gap driven by a single acquired game, not by news output, forcing them to answer on engagement rather than headlines.
Second-order effects
- Rival publishers are pushed toward building or acquiring their own casual-game properties to replicate the owned-traffic effect, extending NYT's Beta Group vertical-app playbook across the industry.
- As platform referrals weaken — Similarweb later showed Twitter referral traffic to major outlets falling 12% on average — owned engagement products like games become more valuable than social distribution, shifting publisher investment away from chasing referrals.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news economics tilt further toward portfolio businesses where a free game subsidizes journalism subscriptions, and audience size is decoupled from news consumption itself — a structural advantage for publishers with capital to acquire viral properties early.
- Rankings based on raw visits increasingly reward engagement products over reporting reach, pressuring smaller outlets without a game or app franchise to consolidate or cede the top tier.
The trend: News publishers are converting acquired viral games into owned-audience engines, replacing declining platform referrals with product-led traffic they control.