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Re:Why Lichess will always be free by 9387367 on Friday April 23, 2021 @04:20AM (#26912358)
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.

Re:Why Lichess will always be free by giords on Friday April 23, 2021 @05:11AM (#26912657)
You're pretty much describing chess.com
Re:Why Lichess will always be free by Scarblac on Friday April 23, 2021 @05:37AM (#26912820)
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.

Re:Why Lichess will always be free by greedo on Friday April 23, 2021 @11:08AM (#26915477)
You do realize that the world champion regularly plays on lichess, right? As do a huge number of GMs?
Re:Why Lichess will always be free by nicky0 on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:35PM (#26917119)
I think the point was that Chess.com is financially supporting lots of streamers (including titled players).
Re:Why Lichess will always be free by Scarblac on Saturday April 24, 2021 @10:04AM (#26924896)
Yes but they don't pay GMs to produce content.
Re:Why Lichess will always be free by srg0 on Friday April 23, 2021 @08:26AM (#26913988)
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.