Wordle: a word game with zero ads or subscriptions, sold to The New York Times

Josh Wardle built Wordle for one person: his partner, who liked word games. He released it publicly in October 2021 with no monetization plan at all — no display ads, no in-app purchases, no newsletter upsell, not even a donations link. It was a single daily puzzle, one URL, and a share button that printed a grid of colored squares.

The growth curve that made the sale possible

On November 1, 2021, about 90 people played Wordle. By January 2, 2022, that had grown to roughly 300,000 daily players. A week later, on January 9, it passed 2 million. The share-square grid people were posting to Twitter functioned as a self-replicating ad for the game — every post was both a brag and an invitation, and it cost Wardle nothing to run. That growth curve, not a revenue statement, was the entire pitch when The New York Times came calling.

On January 31, 2022, the Times announced it had bought Wordle for an amount it described publicly only as "low seven figures" — reporting at the time put that in the roughly $1 million to $3 million range. The paper kept the game free to new players at launch and folded it into its Games section alongside the Crossword and Spelling Bee, where it now sits behind part of the Times's paywalled bundle for longtime users.

Why a site with $0 in revenue was still worth millions

This is the case study's central lesson for anyone thinking about selling a site: buyers for an audience-stage property are not always pricing trailing revenue. The Times was not buying Wordle's ad income, because there wasn't any — it was buying a habit. Millions of people were opening one URL every single day and telling their friends about it unprompted. For a subscription publisher whose core product is habitual daily engagement (a crossword, a puzzle, a briefing), that kind of behavior is close to the whole business model, and it is far harder to manufacture than to acquire.

Most publishers will never get an unsolicited offer from a media company. The realistic version of this playbook runs through a marketplace instead, where a site's trailing 12-month profit — not its narrative — sets the price:

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Empire Flippers and similar brokers value a typical content or SaaS site as a multiple of monthly profit (content sites commonly trade around 30-45x monthly net profit, per typical marketplace multiples), which means Wordle's near-zero revenue should have made it worth close to nothing on a broker's spreadsheet. The gap between that math and the actual sale price is exactly why strategic acquirers — a company buying for audience, talent or a specific feature rather than cash flow — can pay multiples that no marketplace comp would predict.

What to take from it

For the overwhelming majority of publishers, revenue-first is still the right approach: run display advertising or affiliate links while you build, because a strategic buyer showing up unprompted is not a plan. But Wordle is a useful reminder that traffic and engagement are themselves an asset independent of how well you've monetized them, and that the two biggest levers in a sale are usually distribution you didn't pay for and a buyer who needs exactly what you built — not the ad stack you bolted on last.