11 January 2022
Media companies all around the globe consider interactive crosswords to be one of their digital edition's most important loyalty drivers. Let's take a look at how some media companies use interactive crosswords to drive reader engagement.
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Crosswords. Kind of makes you think of the coffee stained newspaper on your grandparents’ tile table, right? Well, the good old word puzzles are still very much alive and kicking, and media houses all around the globe consider them to be one of their digital edition's most important loyalty drivers.
Take Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad as an example. They publish a daily newspaper from Monday to Saturday, while on Sundays they only publish a Crossword supplement. Now you would think that this would affect the daily download figures negatively, but that is far from the case. In fact, the Sunday publication averages almost the same amount of downloads as the newspaper.
In other words, Kristeligt Dagblad can engage its readers all seven days of the week even though the newsroom staff only produces six newspapers. Simply because the readers love solving crosswords.
The Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten also looks to the crosswords for increasing their readers’ engagement with the ePaper. They always have a crossword page in their daily newspaper, and if you dig into the data, you will see that this is a popular page. Thus, every sixth of Göteborg Posten’s digital readers interact with the crosswords daily.
So, the statistics are clear evidence that crossword puzzles still have wide appeal to this day. When directly asked, the readers also confirm this. In a recent (June 2019) survey, users were asked to rate the relevance of being able to solve crossword puzzles digitally in the ePaper. And the feedback was that two out of five respondents found it to be ‘Relevant’ or ‘Very relevant’.
And it is not just at our longitudes that crosswords are business critical. American news giant The New York Times has a business model where they gate all of their content behind a paywall. Not just their journalism. You need to have a subscription to the likes of food recipes and, you guessed it, crosswords.
The latter has exceeded 250,000 subscriptions alone. And at $6.95/Month, it’s easy to see a good business case in crosswords.
Maybe you already have crosswords in your print publication but haven't figured out how to make them interactive in your digital edition. Or perhaps you would like to introduce a crossword supplement on a given weekday. In either case, you can reach out to our Business Development team to learn how we can implement interactive crosswords in your news app.
