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Comment by 9387367 | Hacker News Reader

You are missing the point. Lichess is creating a very strong competitive advantage by positioning their platform as ad free.

Want to put this to a test? Imagine if you were to create a competitor and you also wanted to run ads, now imagine you will be competing with an extremely successful project that people love that doesn’t run ads so you will never be able to offer a better experience to their users.

Lichess is unbeatable.

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You're pretty much describing chess.com

And chess.com has more money to spend, so they can have things like paid grandmasters streaming, video courses, offical tournaments with large prizes. It's not all ad based, they also have a subscription model that opens more features.

It's good that both exist. I spend 99% of my online chess playing time on Lichess but there are also lots of people for who it is the other way around.

You do realize that the world champion regularly plays on lichess, right? As do a huge number of GMs?

I think the point was that Chess.com is financially supporting lots of streamers (including titled players).

Yes but they don't pay GMs to produce content.

chess.com was founded in 2007. lichess started in 2010. So chess.com was already an established player.

The point is that creating a new chess site today would require to be better than lichess. If we look where Magnus Carlsen investment goes, they are all paid services (Play Magnus/chess24/chessable). He doesn't event try to compete with chess.com/lichess.

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