Hasbro would have been another one: stick it next to the sales page for Scrabble, pretty strong audience overlap I would think, and they have an instant winner due to the reduced marketing costs.
NYT has been charging separately and extra for access to their word games online for years. 'tptacek's explanation isn't wrong, it just undersells it by a lot - word games have been an NYT premium sub business since before their news digital sub business took off.
