The New York Times launches a family subscription (with separate Wordles for everyone)

What’s more wholesome and family-friendly than matching holiday pajamas?

How about not having to fight with a family member over who gets to play Wordle? That’s the message The New York Times is sending with a new family subscription (and coordinated merch drop) on Monday.

The new All Access Family option ($30/month for up to four users) includes everything in the Times’ growing bundle of digital products. There’s also a standalone Games family subscription ($10/month) for families most interested in their Wordle streaks.

The family option costs about $5 more per month than an individual subscription. An individual games subscription costs about $50/year, while a family games-only subscription will set you back $120/year.

The new offering allows the Times to entice new subscribers, upgrade existing subscribers, and bring new (and potentially younger) audiences into the fold. Early testing also suggests family plans have higher retention rates, New York Times head of subscription growth Ben Cotton said.

“The idea of the Times as a shared experience is something that we have leaned into for a long time,” Cotton said. “We’ve heard so many wonderful stories over the years about families learning to love the Times by sharing different sections of the print paper at the breakfast table.”

The NYT Family subscription is an attempt, Cotton said, “to create that kind of communal experience in the digital world.”

The business strategy behind a family subscription is hardly new. In the heyday of print, family reading — swapping sections over coffee and breakfast, especially on the weekends — encouraged the newspaper habit in younger people. (Daily readership for high schoolers who had the newspaper available at home increased by 13% each year, according to one pre-internet study.) Long before the Times acquired The Athletic and Wordle, the publication sought to “add zest to the paper” to “attract readers and advertisers” and introduced new sections dedicated to home, sports, and science in the late 1970s.

The softer news in the new sections made the covers of both New York magazine (which decried the changes as “middle-class self-absorption”) and Time. The sections had the intended effect, however. Daily circulation jumped and advertising hit an all-time high, the cover story in Time noted. “It was still The New York Times,” executive editor A. M. Rosenthal said in an interview years later. “My God, you pick up that paper and we may have half a page on asparagus but it’s still The New York Times.”

Today, the Times offers its journalism alongside Connections, Wirecutter, and Fantasy Football coverage. And there’s more asparagus than ever; the wildly popular NYT Cooking app has 348 recipes featuring the vegetable.

The NYT Family subscription will allow users to personalize their Times experience. Each family member can create their own login, save personalized recipe boxes on Cooking, subscribe to email newsletters, and curate their own saved articles in news.

Perhaps most importantly? You won’t log on to Wordle or the crossword to find someone has already completed it for the day. (The Times confirmed to me that Games-related requests were an important part of launching the family subscription.) Each family member can have their own stats and streaks on the Times’ growing collection of games and puzzles. They can also compete against one another on shared leaderboards.

Cotton said the Times has been “really encouraged” by early reviews and results for the family subscriptions. During beta testing, the Times customer service team started fielding calls from readers who’d heard about the family subscription plan and wanted in.

Other digital subscription businesses (think: Netflix) have cracked down on password sharing and limited family accounts to a single household. Will the Times use geolocation to ensure every family member lived in the same location? More specifically, can I add my Nana — who lives in Maine — to my subscription?

“We realize that families take many forms, and so we are leaving it up to you to decide what you want to consider your family,” Cotton said, so the family subscription can include family or friends who don’t share a household.

“We want to make sure all Nanas have access, and that all Nanas can share with their grandchildren,” he confirmed.

The New York Times currently has 11.66 million subscribers — a number the organization is trying to increase to 15 million by the end of 2027. Each family subscription will count as two subscribers, Cotton said, no matter how many family members are added.