What is it?
By offering a game related to your niche or brand, you create an asset that captures people's interest and allows you to collect their email addresses.
A fashion brand could offer a game where you act as a personal stylist, while a sports site might have trivia games related to teams or players.
Subscribers get something entertaining in exchange for their email, while you grow your list with people interested in your niche.
The Good and the Bad
Examples of how to crush it
Extra Points
In 2022, Matt Brown, creator of the Extra Points newsletter, developed a simple text-based game called Athletic Director Simulator 3000 to test his new Python skills.
The game's objective was humorous: to "win," players had to have their athletic department purchase a bunch of subscriptions to Extra Points.
Despite being a gag, the game resonated with his audience, including athletic directors, leading to unexpected engagement. This increased traffic to the newsletter and grew subscriptions significantly.
“If this leads more people to read and enjoy Extra Points (kind of like Wordle and the NYT, maybe?) then this will make business sense for us, even if people only subscribe for a month or two.”
New York Times
In January 2022, The New York Times acquired Wordle, a super-popular online word game.
Note: while this was an acquisition, I've included it here because a similarly simple game could be produced using no-code tools for free. There was no big budget behind building Wordle.
By offering Wordle for free on their website, NYT attracts a huge number of new visitors who come specifically to play the game.
To make the most of all this traffic, NYT invites Wordle players to subscribe to their daily puzzle newsletter.
