How the Chess.com empire makes more than $100M a year - Sherwood News
In October 2020, Netflix released The Queen’s Gambit, a coming-of-age drama about a (fictional) young chess prodigy who overcomes her upbringing, gender stereotypes, and alcohol dependency to conquer the high-stakes world of chess.
The show quickly stormed to the top of the streaming charts… and, while the game itself was but a narrative pawn to advance the story, its success threw fuel on the fire of a global chess boom, as hordes of lockdown-weary, entertainment-starved people turned to one of the world’s oldest games. And, at the center of it all, was Chess.com — a company that’s made all of the right moves, creating an online chess empire that makes hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
When founders Erik Allebest and Jay Severson bought the Chess.com domain for $55K in 2005, they envisaged it as a forum for enthusiasts. However, unprecedented demand for online gameplay led to the pair developing their own technology for a chess portal, launching an early version of the subscriber-based site in 2007. Since then, the website has gone from strength to strength, with data provided to Chartr by digital intelligence platform Similarweb revealing that traffic to the site has soared.
Apart from having the most valuable internet chess real estate possible in the form of its eponymous, search-engine-optimized site, Chess.com has made a series of strategic acquisitions that have helped it move towards an online chess monopoly. It bought rival sites ChessPark in 2009, ChessVibes in 2013, and, most recently, PlayMagnus, named after the Norwegian world champion, for ~$83M in 2022.
