Table of Contents
What’s Wordle
If you’ve been living under a rock, Wordle is a word game. You have 6 guesses to guess the day’s 5 letter word. Letters in the correct position are colored green, letters in the wrong place are colored yellow, and letters not in the word are grey.
The goal is to guess the word in as few guesses as possible. If that’s not your goal, what are you doing?
Wordle exploded into the mainstream in 2022. It’s also responsible for saving a grandmother from armed robbers (source).
The creator behind Wordle, Josh aka PowerLanguage on the internet, creates projects focusing on human interaction. He created equally interesting projects at Reddit.
Let’s dig into Wordle’s rocketship growth.
How it started
Based on the Web Archive, the first version of Wordle was publicly released on October 15, 2021. The first backlink to the Wordle game came on November 17, 2021.
Ahrefs shows a huge increase in organic sessions from December 20 to December 21, 2021. Wordle increased from 17,274 to 135,438 in organic sessions. Ahrefs is likely off but probably not by much. Wow!
This corresponds to more sharing of Wordle scores on Twitter.
How it grew
Wordle is an excellent case study for word-of-mouth growth. And how you can build it into the application in an authentic way. But it’s more than just word of mouth growth.
It’s a mixture of the below:
- Built in word of mouth
- Unbingable
- Gamification via streaks
Word of mouth
Clicking “share” copies a recreation of your gameboard plus your score out of 6. There’s no mention of Wordle. And no link. This requires a conversation to ensue which triggers a branded search. It’s possible this was a fluke but I think it’s manufactured as the creator is interested in the human interaction component.
Sharing your score doesn’t seem like a promotion of an app. It’s just a way for you to brag about yourself. And the whole reason you share via text message or on social media is to compare yourself to your friends and family.
We’re competitive by nature.
Unbingable
This is small but very important. You can only play one game of Wordle each day. This prevents the user from burning out. It also creates a daily ritual of completing the puzzle and sharing your score.
And the sharing portion compounds discovery each and every day because users are obsessed with their streak.
Gamification via streaks
Wordle tracks your success streak for you. There is no external communication such as a push notification reminding you of a streak. But it’s there front and center when you click to share your score.
The longer a streak the higher likely hood of the user continuing to play the game. The Lindy Effect is strong.
Acquired by New York Times
Wordle was acquired by the New York Times on January 31, 2022. Remember the application appears to have been launched in October and started to blow up around Thanksgiving.
The acquisition terms are unknown – specifically the sale price.
Wordle’s creator published a letter to Twitter.
NYT moved Wordle to their domain last week. Nothing appears to have changed yet.
Based on Google Trends, Wordle is still on the up and up (as of now).
NYT’s Opportunities
NYT has a big opportunity with Wordle. The NYT audience is obsessed with puzzles. The acquisition makes a ton of sense.
They need to figure out a monetization path. And keep the puzzle fresh. They are still growing. Once users start leaving (not completing puzzles daily) it will be much harder to reactivate them.
Monetization ideas
The obvious means of monetization are:
- Place banner ads on the game
- Place the game behind a NYT paywall
- Continue to allow free plays plus upsells/add-ons for additional plays
There are numerous opportunities.
I no longer play the game. It was fun for about a month. It’s a wonderful success story regardless of the amount of money. A curious individual created a fun game as a social experiment and it took off like a rocket. There are a lot of learnings to pull out of the experiment (more than I glossed over).
Did I miss something obvious? Shoot me an email.