How Chess.com became a $500M Business?

No, it's concluded. So, it doesn't really work anymore. So, Queen's Gambit pretty much prop up this thing to go into like Stratosphere regarding the downloads because before it was literally like dead like it wasn't dead. It was just this is mobile app. Like it was it was not cool to play chess basically before that. It was cool to play chess. It was just like they played it on the web. Nobody car That's like nobody cared on mobile. That's it. Yeah. It's it's huge on web. I mean they there are some some articles that say like they're made like 500 [Music] million [Music] talking through the cyerspace. [Music]

Felix ads are beautiful. You like the way? Click it fast. Don't delay. [Music] Yo, have you heard about chess grandmasters? Well, me and Jakob are chess grand losers cuz we can't play chess to save our lives. We are definitely not grand masters. Grand is pretty accurate. That's pretty accurate. But there is a there is a grandmaster in the chess.com which name is very Japanese. Who is it? The guy who lost today to Magnus. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently I don't I don't know. So yeah. Well, by the way, we're

talking about chess.com because why not? And my name is Matish. And I'm grandmaster loser. Wait, grand loser Felix Proberg. And the guy who Matei is talking about is Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who just lost today to Magnus Carlson, which is the world's top chess player. Exactly. And by the way, we are your host, but that doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. But And what are we talking about right now? We're going to talk about chess and chess.com's app. Yeah. Chess and chess.com. Yeah. So, let's start with the numbers because I guess this is a little bit more Can you Can you play? Yeah. I want to So, let's start first with the numbers. So, you can talk about the numbers and then I can like focus on getting my Can you also break down the game design of chess? Yeah. And all the special offers and everything. It was It was great. No, I I have some Oh, by the way, there's no UA. Thank you very much for listening.

There's no UA. I mean there is uh only YouTubers and creators talking about the game. The guys the the Magnus guy Magnus Magnus is the exactly you have you have all the grand masters that are playing like they are the UA and there are like few YouTubers and there's one YouTuber which is actually just celebrate like 5 million subscribers and he's talking constantly about chess. So I mean also it's it's the chess platform. There's I mean there are a few others but not not that many of Yeah. It's like no way. You type chess into the Google and you have chess.com. Period. So, um why I'm talking about this or why we are talking about this? Because of this curve which looks great and the thing is currently Oh, not this one. This looks awful actually. Active user base though. Still pretty good. Yeah. What is it? But this one. So, it's hitting even today is hitting record revenue of something likeund pretty much like 200k a day. IP

on mobile. On mobile only. Yes. And you Oh, well, you know why? I think I know why. I know why. Because today's episode is brought to you by 5X Partners. And maybe maybe they called PVX partners to actually get the money for scaling UA even though I said no UA, but this you know PVX partners is the small effective grade line for marketing. And I think chess.com might be on onto something. But if you're scaling your game or game business and need funding, you should definitely call PVX partners. Uh it's pvxpartners.com. And there's no equity dilution. You can repay as you get paid. It's very flexible and pretty fast. So you can get the term sheet in just 24 hours. Don't wait. Take control of your UA and become a grandmaster of of scaling. M yeah, pvx partners.com. There you go. I I know that Mach just said a

bunch of stupid just now, but PVX partners are actually great. Yeah, don't don't repeat the mistakes of Batman as you've seen in the latest episode. In the latest episode. So yeah, chess.com is scaling revenue and it's subscription revenue. Correct. Yeah, say subscription revenue. I think it's subscription revenue only if I understand correctly. Yeah, I have the table here actually. There are like some uh microtransactions but nobody cares. There's a gold which I don't know man in chess.com website or the app the app I think. Yeah. I haven't seen any. Yeah. chess.com official membership information that's on the chess. There's not even shop button. Chess.com. Yeah. Chess.com. So basically what I think is actually going on here, right? I think this is a bit like an app funnel, right? So you got to think about it like it's actually a utility because most people come here probably from online when you open up the community of chess. Yeah. So you go on chess.com you make an account

and then there is where you can sign up also and obviously chess.com prefers you to sign up online by the way. Yeah, of course it is. It's exactly exactly. Yeah. So So there there's gold pre platinum and diamond. So it's 50, 80, and 120 per year. Yeah. Yeah. Different features. Yeah. 90 for diamond, 60 for platinum. What? 37 for gold. Yeah, that's interesting. So there are multiple different because they I guess it's cheaper on the website, isn't it? Because of the store cut. Yeah, should be makes sense. Anyway, so back to numbers. Yeah, it's currently doing something like 120k downloads a day, which is amazing. Uh, and you see how like this whole thing just spiked from 2020. I don't know if this is corona or or what

is this? It is September like October, November. This is before Corona. But now 2019 is corona. 2019 is corona. 2019, December is corona. And then already Yeah. Okay. This is something. Yeah. Yeah. Go. I I I see. I saw it. Oh, I know. When is it was 2020? October. Yeah. October 2020. Queen's Gambit. you in your face. Queen's Gambit. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, there's a lot of these like important external factors that are covering this thing. That's why no UA is the amazing part of this whole story. Then there's uh what is this? Uh September 2023, which is somewhere a spike by the way. No, it's not. It's not. No, September 2023 is actually where is it? August here. Like

literally like nothing. Nothing. It was just nice. So this is the Clash Royale Clash Collaborations collaboration. There's literally you see the giant uh announcement video on Clash of Clans channel where there's community managers from Clash Royale, from Clash of Clans, and from chess.com. There's like crossover events with like themed chest style like Clash Royale bots and Clash of Clans skins or whatever in both Clash Royale and Clash of Clans. And then in chess chess.com where you have these like bots of specific characters from the Clash universe, you can battle them. By the way, just introducing the bots was like very very big thing that they did here uh within the app. And if I understand correctly, this giant spike, when was it? Is like January 2023 is the cat B

called Mittens. It's the mittens. Yes. Exactly. So, so they introduce a cat bot called Mittens and and it went like quarter million downloads a day and and if I understand this should be pretty good traffic. There's a glo global media coverage of cheating controversy as well which kept chasing headlines and they're also Yeah, US country there. So this is and there's also the the viral image of of Messi and Ronaldo playing chess. I'm not sure if you saw it but I saw it and it was just it was everywhere basically. A lot of the growth is actually also behind Magnus Carlson which is the top grandmaster of chess and this guy does stuff very very flashy in a way that it draws a lot of attention. So, for instance, that controversy that he had with the guy, it was like he he did one move and then he resigned and said didn't say anything, but he pretty much implied that he was cheating and stuff and uh then he had

this thing where he didn't change his clothes and he went in like jeans and and they disqualified him like the chess association or whatever. And like when he left like nobody cared anymore about because like it's all you know about him basically and stuff like that basically. So he has 2 million around 2 million followers on on Instagram and like he's been on Joe Rogan and a bunch of this stuff. Super famous. He's like literally the new new generation of chess chess masters like not the ones that you see like somewhere sitting in the basement. This is the guy that wants to have as much attention as possible and he uses it properly because as we saw in the research for this his company play Magnus if I got if I understand merged with the chess.com with chess.com. Yes, exactly. So he's also probably the official influencer or the the face of the whole thing if can you go back to sensor tower and let me show you why I

have a broken heart on this episode. Yeah. Go to activ now or later broken heart later. Okay. Click it. Click it. Click it. Just finish the feature set of all right. Yeah. Yeah. So the important part is like if you chess is categorized into board and like if you go to board downloads chess.com. Were you bored as well when you were losing? It's it's actually on the fourth place in downloads. Uh with first place being Ludoking which we still didn't cover and we need to No way. Yeah. Yeah. We need to do it. It's on the list for like two years. Yeah. If you go into revenue, the first thing is Yatsi with buddies from Scopely and then in the second spot is like 4.5 million a month. Zero zero UA no spend. I mean no like there were no literally no investors. Yeah. No investors until

2022. It's just like seriously this is insane. By the way, on the third spot, there's also Yala Ludo. The other Ludo game, which we need to Okay, we need to do Ludo. We need to do Ludo at some point. No way. No, no, no. Why? We It can wait another two years. Jesus Christ. Anyway, Ludo Star. There you go. As you saw there, like here's the Clash of Clash Royale. Like, it's still up up here. Like, you can I think do something still with it. But anyway, no, it's concluded. So, it doesn't really work anymore. Queen's Gambit pretty much prop up this thing to go into like Stratosphere regarding the downloads because before it was literally like dead. It wasn't dead. It was just This is mobile app. Like it was it was not cool to play chess basically before that. It was cool to play chess. It was just like they played it on the web. Yeah. Nobody car That's like nobody cared on mobile. That's it. Yeah. Exactly. It's it's huge on web. I mean there are like some some articles that

say like they made like 500 million man. Like I remember when was this like I remember 25 years ago when I walk into uh 25 years ago you were like what like one year old? N I walk into the lab of my mother when she was teaching at university and math lab. Chemist lab. Oh yeah. Met lab. There was there was one of her colleagues. He was literally like what are you doing on the on like on the computer because it was like only there university internet like no internet. Yeah, of course. I like this like this is a chess game that the world is playing. Kasperski and it was like one move per like three days or something and he's like he would make the move and then the whole world would vote on one other move against him or something like that. It was already back then on on the web and like wow that's amazing and like yeah and here we are. Here we are. Yeah. 25 years later. Yeah. Because you can still do these things here in the app because the

interesting part is like the settings thing is that you can play like 20 different version of chess if I understand. You have puzzles and there's like one of something about titles Tuesday or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if I go into where's the setting button? This one rating. No. Where was it? Because if you play, you actually need to select for how long. You want to start? Yeah. Three. I didn't want to. You're going to let someone down now, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The broken part that Felix should take because I'm Yeah. So, it's it's like still very very like nothing's pretty fleshy. Okay. I shouldn't have done that already. Don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry. It's three minutes. Don't worry. You were just Yeah, it was just loose. Come on. Show me. Yeah, I know. I'll just lose. It's okay. But let's do comic because they lose at least. So, it's my turn. No, it's not. No, it's his turn. It's

his turn. Or hers or hers. Whoever he said kamik. It doesn't matter. Don't think. Just Yeah. Go, go, go. Just butcher. Okay. Thinking a little bit at least. Yeah. Boring. I know. Are you bored? Are you Yeah. So, you see, you have different different conditions and different things that you can kind of go for regarding like how I mean you're playing chess. You're playing chess. The important part No, man. The important part is like it's 3 minutes only. Yes. If you run out of time, you lose. If I run out of my 3 minutes, I lose. If the guy run out of three minutes is lose. Doesn't matter what's the state of the board. It's time. That's the thing. Wow. Maybe I'm going to kill him. I know. Maybe. Yes. You don't know. And now it's going to be interesting,

dude. No. No. No. No. No. No. What? What? That's Come on. I mean, yeah. So, dear listeners, we're playing we are playing chess. Well, Yakob is playing chess. While he's doing that, I can actually I can actually talk about some some of the company background. It's going to be quite quick because the chess.com was founded by two college friends, Eric Alabast and Yaram J. Severson. And they met at the university and actually they sold a business wholesale chess for 2.5 million. Eric purchased a domain named chess.com for $55,000. Great investment. That's it's really good investing 2025. So then uh it was developed and then kind of launched the the official portal for chess

2007 have a social media campaigns whatever else back then in 2007. Then they expanded small chess website. Espark and Chess Vibes and it was you know it's still a privately held company with these two co-founders and chess as I said operated for years without major VC funding. So in 2022 chess.com took a strategic investor general Atlantic. These guys are OGs like yeah this is I mean it's amazing. They got their fingers in a lot of pies. And yeah, and you know this is they are based in US and they're actually OG's of also remote work because there's no central physical office all fully remote. It's more than 650 people across 60 countries. Engineers, content

editors, support the staff, chase titles players who contribute to the content which is then the UA afterwards. across the whole world. Awesome. And you know they don't have basically competition because they bought all of them and then there's one one other which is Lee chess I think but yeah they're in the 2010 it's grow steady there's 2020 which chess saw resurgence thanks to different things which was Queen's Gambit and then during the COVID obviously when the lockdown happened people couldn't really go out so They started playing chess online also even like clubs were closed for chess so easy. So you have online play, puzzles and training. There's lesson and educational content actually on chess.com. You can analyze games and you have tournaments and leagues. Pro Chess League, Speed Chess Championship,

Chess.com Global Championship, Poke Champs, an amateur streamer tournament that Chess.com launched in 2020, which invites Twitch and YouTube personalities who are not chess professionals to compete under the coaching of chess masters, which is interesting. We're still waiting for my invite. Oh, look, chess masters, not losers. Oh, well, that's just thing. Poke Champs even have featured influences like Mr. Beast, Rubio, who have whoever that is, but Mr. Beast we know obviously. So, it was pretty good. And there's champion chess tour chess tour after acquiring Clay Magnus Group in 2022. chess.com took over the Meltwater Championship Chess Tour series of elite online tournaments that had been run for by the Magnus Carlson former company. Oh my god, so many interesting stuff. So yeah, we talked about the

monetization models, this merch. Oh, there you go. Yakub won. Awesome. Amazing. Amazing. They have sponsorship at app. So there's use there's banners. This is the screen we wanted to get to. So from this it's going to be more of a broken heart. Here you go. There you have the banner. Yeah. So there's the ad monetization of the game because after every single game you have a banner on the desktop version. On the web version there's a lot more banners. And I've read on some forums that they were getting like video ads on the desktop but I haven't seen any of it. But yeah, the important part is that the game the app is more of an app. It also focuses on heavy analysis, heavy coaching and heavy kind of a replay functionality because it's like learning is the main things.

Yeah, you found the right moves at right time. Let's review your shining moments. Start review and the guy pretty much just tells you blah blah blah blah blah. It's all good. Yeah. I'm so great. It's it's limited, by the way. You only get few reviews on the free version. It's paid. Yeah. Yeah. Because then it's paid. And that's that's why I wanted to get to the the actual monetization of the thing because if we go here, you see that where was it the monetization? So, you have unlimited game review, which means those are limited if you're free. Unlimited move explanations. Same thing. unlimited insights, unlimited puzzles, unlimited lessons, unlimited coach games, unlimit uh and unlock all bots, which if I understand already goes on like the first ads as well. Yeah. Yeah. No ads as well because I think even somewhere here like uh not profile but somewhere like analysis was it or somewhere or explorer? No, but I know as I was going through these menus I saw

some banner ads already. There you go. Yeah. Remove ads. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So somewhere here there should be but it's very subtle. See there's dino there. Yeah. So they have few of these banners from here and there but that's it. Like it's it's like very small. Yeah. I don't think the revenue is very small. Yeah. Revenue is not very small but it's like still very sub. It's very subtle. Yeah. Ad revenue is tiny. Really get there. Yeah. That's what that broken heart is all about. Yeah. rocket hard. Let me just finish. We have the play online as you saw there. I'm winning the game solve puzzles which is literally a saga because I'm like uh yeah, I already made it out of like my free puzzles today. But if I can't even show you the saga, but basically this is like normal saga. There's a visualization. There's daily puzzle which is the calendar based one. Let's play a bot where you can literally select some of these bots

which if I understand some of those were the Clash of Clans Clash Royale ones but I guess they are not here anymore. I don't know. Then you play a coach again the learning part that we that we talk about. Then you have this kind of lessons like they have it very very well fleshed out in a way that like it's like really like I guess there's no competition for them. Like if you're into chess, you get this app or this website and like there you go. Then there's some statistics. Of course, your games are archived so you can look into them and like analyze them at Infinum. This is basically the same thing where just with different menus. Yeah, there we go. And this is the important part. So there's like watch and there's everything here that you need to know basically about current chess tournaments, where to watch, where to go. Today they already won the game, but when I was playing this today, there was literally Twitch link and I could just watch it in Twitch right here in in the app. It was just great amazing

integration. You have see all the streamers here. I just click here and it goes in Twitch. Yeah, we have a streamer that's watching a chess chess game now. So, they have it done very very well. Uh it's nothing like you would expect from like old chess app. Like this is very very modern. There's a schedule for like tomorrow. You see the whole lineup, what to what to watch, who's playing who, and so on so forth, like like events calendar. That's that's great. Then you have all the links here from all their socials. By the way, they're are very very strong. You see the numbers there. So, and yeah, the the whole like settings part. This is just the learning part and this is just the like community part. So yeah, hands down like I think for communitywise or whatever like yeah they they done this very well. Last thing I wanted to show you was that chest thing set up. I don't know where it is where you could literally select like how much modes the thing can work

in. Uh no no here because I know when I was playing it Oh here. Yeah, here it is. See how many different modes of chess you can play. Like three minute timer, five minute timer, rapid timer. This is a daily one. Maximum time per move, one day, three days, seven days. It's it goes even to 14 days. Like you can do these like crazy things with these things. It's not just like simple like a year to finish a game, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like like it's it's amazing like how much customization they ability to it. And uh unfortunately it has a broken heart because it has this metric which Felix is going to talk about. Okay. But look it's this is this is on on mobile they have they have more than 200 million monthly visits on the website. Of course even even if you have they like AdSense revenue is like it should be quite significant.

Let's go back first of all here to just the last 30 days, right? Because this is a bit the last 30 days. I mean, this is only mobile. I mean, we if we're talking about mobile, I guess it's not finished, man. You can have your round afterwards. Let's feel finish and then we'll go last straight line 7 and a half mil. Yeah. This is why it's a broken heart, right? But this all goes back to the discussion of what is better, subscription revenue or ad revenue, right? Because basically the key to having ad revenue is having a lot of users which these guys do and then having your users watch a lot of ads right which these guys clearly don't have right and crazy thing is you can see here is the the geographies are quite decent especially in America right 1.3 million daily active in America and most of that is on iOS also if you go into the retention and amount of uh like playtime per day it's quite quite intense, right? It's it's quite a lot.

Day 60 14%. Yeah. 14%. Like really high 12%. Yes. And then if you go in also to session lengths and like the average sessions per day, time spent. Yeah. So time spent per day is about half an hour and then it's about five sessions per day, right? So if you go to revenue again, so in the last 30 days on mobile only, right? which is yeah this this is like benchmark metric five sessions per day. Yeah. So if you go back to revenue as well and yeah performance revenue so on mobile in the last 30 days if you go to 30 days uh this has generated $4.5 million in um subscription revenue on mobile right and here's the thing right since they have this many users to generate the exact same amount uh of ad revenue let me put

it in here in my uh uh yeah in my little thing. What they would need to show is about between two to three uh interstitial ads to 80% of the users and basically oh wait sorry they would show around four interstitial ads per these users to generate about half a million dollars worth of ad revenue on mobile. Right? So basically if you put in also that with banner ads and put in like let's say they put in banner ads during the normal gameplay. So you'd be showing 50 banner ads per day which there's definitely space to do so. There's space. Yeah. Yeah. Basically you're getting closer to like half a million per day, right? So wait, I put in the wrong one. Hang on. Sorry. Just for context. Block blast has around 15 16 million DAU. So it's basically

meaning that per day this could be generated block. Yeah, sorry I put it in the wrong one actually. So actually if you had five interstitial ads on 75% of the user base, which is what I put in before, this would generate about 250K per day in ad revenue, which would mean 7.2 million a month, right? And that's why my heart is broken, right? because you could actually generate more money by showing a very low amount of interstitial ads. So in theory five interstitials per day. Yeah. So if you showed two interstitials per day, right? And this is without the banner ads. This is without the banner ads, you'd be generating 3 million per month, right? And two interstitial ads is not a lot. It's just like show one interstitial ads and it's still Yeah. generating nearly 1.5 million a day in ad revenue, right? People would need to have a talk with you, but you never know like maybe tomorrow like you'll have the call from Magnus again. Yeah, I'm just saying. I'm

just saying, right? Let's Okay, let's even take it down. I'll put it down here in my model, right, with the ECPMs. So, if you're showing one interstitial ads per day, so people are spending five sessions per day and you see one interstitial ad per day, that's still $1.6 $6 million per month in ad revenue, right? Which is and we are still talking about mobile only is only and I think like this the mobile is just like what like 20%. Can you put like last year or like all time maybe all time? So look all time is 150 million in revenue. They make 100 million IIIP. They make apparently at least 100 million revenue per year. Per year. Really? On the all. Yeah. So I mean Yeah. Overall business revenue. So come on giant margin. No UA giant

margin. Come on. That's Yeah, it's all margin. Yeah, it's all margin basically. It's not all margin but still. Yeah, but it's like what 80%. So the funny thing is six interstitial ads per day on 75% of their user base on mobile would generate $und00 million a year. Do you understand how much potential it is here to show ads that they're missing out on? Purity is nice, but seriously one interstitial ads for 75% of the users on mobile when they're playing five sessions per day and get like it's it's crazy. It's you could you could basically double the revenue man. This is overall business revenue. Yeah. Overall business revenue or even like even doing an interstitial on app open if it's five app open just show the app open interstitial like it's just purity nice but Felix face. Yeah but yeah purity is if your company makes 100 mil I'm just saying you can make four mil by showing

six interstitial ads. It's crazy. Like I'm not saying show six interstitial ads, but maybe you should segment the users and show a bit of ads. Like it's like yeah, yeah, yeah, fair, fair enough. But it is okay. Okay, here's the question. Here's the more important question. Like, okay, sure. You can't start maybe with ads if you're chess.com, right? And and like not expect a backlash. But there is a happy medium, right? Cuz surely you want people to subscribe. showing banner ads when you finish a chess game is not annoying enough to actually be like, "Oh, that's quite nice to subscribe to." That's why I wanted to say that's why I say you have you have 120 120 uh yearly diamond whatever and yeah there's no ads so you you put more ads so you get more revenue for subscription. Yeah, exactly. So like yeah obviously like the potential is huge but this is exactly the the same same question. If you make 100 mil a year, you just don't care that you can make way more. That's like that's my biggest problem always.

General Atlantic would go in and be like, "Yo, yo, guys." Yeah, exactly. Yo, yeah, General Atlantic in the house. Yeah, guys, maybe you can you can even make more money. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing. But if if they would be spend earning let's say 10 mil or 20 mil a year, that's not 100. So I would say like ah maybe we can explore like how how can we make more money. So this is like that's the cushion that they they just don't care about additional revenue streams or or there's some something else you know it's it's a very different audience. Yeah it's different audience definitely and keep in mind it's all built on this organic trust of the community that the chess masters the grandmasters are driving and so on so forth. So, but but yeah, like pretty much they could, you know, write checks to Netflix all the time because Queen's Gambit is the thing that propped this thing up at as well. They have the Hikaru Nakamura is top

player streaming all the all all the time the all the other people see Magnus doing what he does. So, they they do the same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. So, now we have a bunch of like YouTube YouTube chess grand masters. Okay. But let me just run down the numbers here. Let me just go through what I would start to recommend. Purity. No. Okay. Like, okay, but like, okay, listen to this. Okay, correct me if this sounds too aggressive, right? So, let's say everything you say is too aggressive, man. Okay, but listen, listen. One interstitial ad per day on 75% of the user base. Mhm. And a app open interstitial ads only on after the first app. three of those a day, plus one chess game with banner ads at the bottom. That would generate $116,000 a day or 42 mil a year. Is that aggressive? Like that's Okay, let's let's let's cut it into something feasible. Can you do like 50 mil without

any interstitials and just the rest of the or just the banners? Yeah. Okay, now we're getting a little tricky. Game play time. What was the game? Forceful, man. That's forceful for Remind me what the game play was. What was the game was? Yeah. So, let's say they added a banner on the bottom for the whole time. Meaning that they would probably show anything from 120 to 140 banner ads per user on 70% of the user base. That would mean that they're generating anywhere between 8 to 12 mil a year. So 8 to 12 can do. Too small. Yeah. Banners is like banners is very low ECPM, right? That's why also they Yeah, that's nothing. Yeah. Okay. But okay, let's add on to that like one interstitial cuz honestly adding one interstitial ad that is double that, right?

Yeah, one interstitial ad per day on 75% of the user base is literally 14 mil a year on this user base. Too small. Too small. Too small. Too small to make a dent. Too small to even like you know. Well, the you know you're always brand and like all these other things. Yeah. That's what I was saying. You always say but they could earn so much more money. But you piece of like 100 million players. Yeah, man. That's not really that's you don't really say the other side of the coin. You add interstitial but what happens to all why not make courses that have some rewarded ad element in them or something right? Look at them and like they're growing like crazy. Why should they care like this? Exactly. Like I think they're at this point where like don't touch it. Exactly. Like Yeah. Like don't touch it and don't change the ads. They're basically buying all the competition. There's only less.org orc or chess 24 which was like the biggest competition but now since uh yeah Jan Gustafson and

they founded co-ounded this with Magnus like it's it's also kind of working going into the yeah going into the same direction so come on like it's basically a monopoly that's it chess except it's chess not monopoly except they're playing chess not monopoly [Laughter] all right so basically you guys think you think I think wrong. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm saying that they won't do it and it's not impactful enough for them to do it because they can still grow organically much more stable. It's still going up. It's still going up. It's just metal, man. It's like more percentage kind of statistic that they grow by this way. Even slower, but they'll still grow, which is if they go this way, they could just piss off so many people and then maybe a different platform comes in without the ads and then they're Exactly. And that's not worth it. It's not worth it. Their margin being so big means that it shouldn't be that hard to can attack them if they start to do But their margin is Felix's opportunity. Yeah. I

don't Do you think Do you think that if they had a UA partner, they could do a lot better? Oh, we already scaled it with that. Yes, we already scaled it. We already scaled it. Don't worry. But thank you very much for that. was probably um so so the thing is like they they run Google ads for the the web don't run they don't run anything on the on the mobile because why I don't care like look at the creatives hello zero zero yeah it's nothing maybe if you yeah if you actually go to view view all creatives and then just go back to like 202 202 2022. Thank you very much. You won't see anything because it's uh it's Yeah. 22 January. Yeah. Not even during that clash thing. Maybe. It's rolling. It's There you go. Yeah.

There was that was something which which was very very basically Magnus. Magnus is the face. Yeah. But here we go. I mean this is it. Five of them all static images nothing else. Yeah. YouTube, Facebook. Yeah. So look, why would you even run? Yeah. Why would you? Yeah. It was duration was 4 days. Seriously. Come on. Like nine months maybe. like it's like nothing that huge because why would you do this if you have all the content on the on the and it's like it's the biggest it's the biggest chess platform the whole universe also all the rankings are on chess.com right like what you rank on chess.com is what everyone cares about right you mean like the ATP of chess yeah I guess so well if there's no one else then yes I guess so exactly like You type chess in the in the Google and it's uh it's chess.com.

They're actually ranking on 500,000 keywords. Wait a second. Keywords 587,000. I mean, seriously, like you don't really need UA. You put chess variations of keywords in in the in the in Google chess.com. Thank you very much. All right. Huge. Thank you very much. I don't know what else we can say. Yeah. Nothing else. It's It's an interesting story. So, that's good. And how do we expect the overall revenues of this thing if they're making 100 mil a year? A year from from when like 20? Uh I think they they said they passed the 500 mil mark already. So, I guess yeah, I think like they they started actually growing in 2020 that much. ish ish ish. It's good. Thank you very

much for listening. Good exercise. Yeah, very good exercise. Yeah, please comment under the YouTube video if you like it or not. If you want if you have any other interesting stories that we can cover because we like those as well. And please share the episode, like and join the Slack channel and buy all the merch in in the whole universe 25. Go there. Thank you very much. See you next time. Bye-bye. Checkmate. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music]