At $39.99 a subscription, that’s over $20 million in crossword bucks per year. In 2019, the Times crossword app had over half a million subscribers, double what they’d had the previous year. Before then, the Times had outsourced the game to another company’s platform, but since the app was doing so well, corporate decided to expand the operation. The Times’s crossword app has been housed in-house since 2014. But now, the New York Times and the New York Times crossword became distinct entities.
Until this point, a newspaper’s crossword solvers also had to be its readers, even if they did nothing with the rest of the paper except flip through it to get to the puzzle. You also didn’t automatically get a subscription to the Times if you bought a Times crossword subscription.
MERRIAM WEBSTER CROSSWORD SOFTWARE
If you subscribed to the Times digitally, you would no longer automatically get the crossword now, you had to pay a separate fee and download separate software to play the puzzle on your devices. But in 2012, for the first time in the then-seventy-year history of the Times’s crossword, the puzzle-at least, the digital version-got monetized. Originally, the online version, like its print counterpart, got bundled with the paper a subscription to the digital Times also gave you access to that day’s crossword puzzle online. You can begin the puzzle on your phone in the subway, plug away on your desktop at work, and finish it on your tablet at night. The digital Times puzzle was developed to be the equivalent of carrying around a folded-over Arts section in your pocket, something that follows you on all your screens. The New York Times launched its digital crossword in 1997, fifty-five years after the puzzle’s print debut in that paper. In the digital age, the puzzle has only continued to prove its cockroachlike ability to adapt while remaining exactly the same. Computers have hardly made the crossword obsolete. The version that’s thrived in the digital landscape is the original crossword. Photo: From THINKING INSIDE THE BOX by Adrienne Raphel, courtesy of Penguin Press.
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