The Last Thing Still Selling
The obvious story about the crossword in the twenty-first century is that it's going down with the ship. Newspapers are collapsing; the crossword lives in newspapers; draw your own conclusion.
The numbers do not support it. Where anyone actually counts puzzles as a category, the puzzles are outperforming everything printed around them - and in one market, they were the only thing growing at all.
Sweden counts, and Sweden is startling
Sweden publishes magazine sales by category, which almost nobody else does.
In 2020, the Swedish magazine market fell 12.5 per cent. Crosswords rose 0.4 per cent - the only one of sixteen categories to grow at all in the year everything else fell off a cliff.
It was not a fluke. In 2022 the total market fell about four per cent while crosswords rose eight. Distributor sales of crossword titles are up roughly 23 per cent across five years.
Poland tells the same story more brutally. Crossword magazine sales fell about a quarter over twenty years. Over the same period newspapers fell by something closer to eighty per cent.
Japan has sustained more than thirty million puzzle magazine copies a year for over a decade.
Against that: American weekday newspaper circulation is down roughly two-thirds from its peak, and British regional titles have been shedding close to a fifth of their circulation annually.
In the year the Swedish magazine market fell 12.5 per cent, crosswords were the only one of sixteen categories to grow.
The honest caveat
These are fragments, and it matters to say so. No audited, public, genre-level circulation series exists for any market. Sweden's audit ended in 2016. The British figures sit behind a paywall. The German per-title database couldn't be queried. What survives is a handful of national datapoints that happen to have been published, and they agree with each other - which is suggestive, not conclusive.
Nobody knows how big this is
Here's the part that surprised us most. There is no credible figure for the size of the global puzzle industry, and there cannot be one, for structural reasons.
Every significant publisher is opaque by design. The sector's largest player, Keesing, is private-equity owned and unlisted. Penny Dell is private. Puzzler Media, now part of DC Thomson, files full accounts - as scanned images with no text layer. Bauer, one of the largest magazine publishers on earth, publishes no revenue figure at all and doesn't mention puzzles anywhere in its corporate material.
And the New York Times, which for years was the one listed company reporting a usable public proxy for puzzle revenue, has just stopped breaking it out.
Search for the size of this market and you'll find dozens of confident answers - "Puzzle Magazines Market Size, CAGR 6.4%" and so on. Every one is template-generated, cites no auditable method, and disagrees with the others. We'd rather print no number than one of theirs.
What can honestly be said, as an inference rather than a fact: Keesing turns over around €300 million a year and ships something like 200 million puzzle magazines, and a sale process has sought up to €550 million for it. If Europe's largest pure-play puzzle publisher is a sub-billion-euro asset, the entire global print puzzle-magazine business is plausibly low single-digit billions. That's a bottom-up estimate, and it's the most anyone can responsibly offer.
Where it is going instead
The interesting movement is not decline. It is migration.
Keesing now supplies puzzles to Netflix Games - the company that prints 200 million magazines a year is also feeding a streaming platform's games tab. Penny Dell sold off its four fiction magazines in 2025, leaving it a pure-play puzzle publisher: it looked at what it owned and concluded the puzzles were the business.
The crossword is not dying with print. It is doing what it has done since a Liverpudlian filled a Christmas supplement in 1913 - moving to wherever people are, and taking the grid with it. It was a newspaper feature because newspapers were where people were. That was never the important part.
The important part is that a hundred and twelve years later, in the one magazine market that troubles to count, it's the last thing still selling.