Why is Lichess user growth stalling, compared to Chess.com, in 2021~2024?

@mkubecek said in #20:

First, lichess is better for specific group of people who, like it or not, are a minority in today's society. Just go through the forum and you'll se a number of "make lichess more like chess-com" requests, whether it's about "boring design", more "gamification" or fake features ("brilliant moves", "rating performance in a game", ...). It shows that even many lichess users would rather prefer it to be just "chess-com for free".
Thanks. Your observation is right, I see this too, that really make sense.
I am just pessimistic, will Lichess be the next Chess24 if it percentage continue to fall?

Second, unlike chess-com, lichess does not really compete on a market. That may sound like a formal difference but it's actually quite important. It e.g. means that lichess is less likely to add "bells and whistles" type of features and pseudoimprovements just to attract masses. It also means that lichess is less pushed into making numbers look better in order to make investors happy. And when you compare the growth (or lack thereof), did you make sure you are using comparable values? Hint: are those numbers the total number of accounts - or unique users? Or only active ones? And if it's the latter, do you define "active" in the same way on both sites?

Chess.com usually keeps secret about their data (compared to Lichess, that is also why I hate it), and I can only try to find data in their reports and X tweets. I don't know how many users are there accurately, but as they say they already have 100M user, 10M peak daily active user and 12.5B yearly games in 2023. Days ago they say 2024 peak daily user is over 17M now.
I estimate Lichess daily active users is somewhere between 200k to 3.2M, according to my previous sampled game timelength and lobby data (35k~90k active playing users at sampled timepoint). And as listed above, active game ratio is 10:1 last year.

https://esports.gg/news/chess/chess-com-crashes-as-it-hits-the-highest-ever-daily-active-users/
https://yourstory.com/2023/04/chess-com-success-story-online-chess-dominance

According to my own experience, chess.com popped up on internet when I searched an application to play online. Maybe Lichess shown up, but chess.com display was more attractive.

With time, I heard about Lichess on YouTube videos from masters. I decided to have a closer look at Lichess and discovered that this application had everything I needed,without publicity thanks!

@Cheshire_the_Maomao said in #21:

Thanks. Your observation is right, I see this too, that really make sense.
I am just pessimistic, will Lichess be the next Chess24 if it percentage continue to fall?

Chess24 was never really that big but anyway they did not disappear because they lost players. They lost because they were bought as a one part of "Play Magnus" group and as a part of merging process chess.com shut down the services and integrated their offering to chess.com.

Associations cannot sold.

chess.com took some funding and in my opinion from a growth fund which would required to grow their valuation. They say they didn't and they aren't, but, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

they use the money for marketing and buying their closest competitors. some of their marketing has been really good, I assume it was expensive, though. like getting the most popular video game streamers involved in playing in a chess competition, etc. Some of those streamers have millions of followers. They also pay GMs to not play on lichess while on stream.

why didn't lichess grow at the same rate as chess.com? they didn't buy competitors, I don't think they spent a lot of money on a clever marketing campaign involving streamers with millions of followers (maybe they did and I didn't hear about it?) and they don't pay GMs to not play on chess.com while on stream.

@h2b2 said in #24:

chess.com took some funding and in my opinion from a growth fund which would required to grow their valuation. They say they didn't and they aren't, but, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
It's the business mentality that I don't understand: you grow or you die. I've seen good software projects that were popular, had their stable and loyal userbase, generated a steady income... but the company discontinued them because they didn't grow and "we didn't see any growth potential". (There are exceptions, of course, I have also seen companies which seem to work like collectors of declining niche products with a perspective of generating a solid profit for some foreseeable future.)

Which leads us to:
@Cheshire_the_Maomao said in #21:

I am just pessimistic, will Lichess be the next Chess24 if it percentage continue to fall?
The advantage of lichess is that it's not a business project with impatient investors who would scrap it if it doesn't grow. As long as there is a stable user base, people willing to run it and help with it and income sufficient to keep it running, there is absolutely no reason to kill it just because some numbers don't grow (or don't grow fast enough).

Sure, I would also prefer if my friends at a local club were playing on lichess rather then chess-com (and complaining how they ran out of puzzles for the day). But lichess can also live happily as a minority platform.

@Cheshire_the_Maomao said in #16:

Yes, what is the problem?
Lichess get 1.1B in year 2023 and 5B up to 2023 cumulative.
Chess.com get 12.5B in 2023 and I believe more than 22B cumulative.
We cannot compare Lichess cumulative to Chess.com 1 year......

www.chess.com/news/view/2023-year-in-review

And yes my data is from database.lichess.org too. It is about 90-100M a month and about 1.1B a year. Hope my math is correct.

It is real that Chess.com keep grow since 2022-23, while Lichesa not...

My bad, I thought you were talking about amount of games since lichess started.

@mkubecek said in #25:

It's the business mentality that I don't understand: you grow or you die
In case chess.com they probably needed funding for their current plans. And a venture capitalist is not going put down money for the joy running business as is. Given the rate they lose money on wrong investments the one that work must work well. Growth does not even mean you are doing well. All the payments for content creators whether as youtubers or making chess.com intenal videos eats who lotta of money and maybe 1% has paid subscription. Probably plan is to grow big enough for public offering

So lichess growing organically and within limits of donations is pretty good choise.

@mkubecek said in #25:

Isn't that awesome? The whole concept of infinite growth or die ist just so unnecessary when you think about it.
I love that there are at least small spaces left, where good and going steady is good enough, no need to grow exponentially, just happy to be working and slowly getting better.

All things that are made to grow infinitely, die under the strain...