It’s TIME To Acknowledge Chess: Chess.com Named In Prestigious 100 Most Influential Companies List
Who would have seen this coming before 2020, The Queen’s Gambit, and the rise of chess as an esport? Chess.com, the world’s leading chess platform, has been named in TIME’s prestigious 100 Most Influential Companies of 2023 list.
The site, founded in 2005 by college friends Erik Allebest and Jay Severson, is part of an impressive list, which you can find here. Chess.com was listed as a "Disrupter" alongside Nvidia, Canva, Duolingo, Open AI and Discord. The cover features Kim Kardashian:
Inside, the citation praises Chess.com for its "savvy and often comical marketing strategy" and notes how the site has grown into younger markets.
About the accolade, Erik said: “For the last 17 years we have been focused on our mission of serving and growing the chess community. It’s a huge and humbling honor to have this recognized. Chess has the power to impact and improve lives, and I’m incredibly happy to see that recognized by TIME.”
Chess has the power to impact and improve lives, and I’m incredibly happy to see that recognized by TIME.
— Erik Allebest, Chess.com's CEO.
This year Chess.com—and chess in general—has seen an astonishing rise in popularity that has catapulted the game up the app charts.
At various points, Chess.com has hit number 1 on both Google Play and the U.S. iOS app store. In May, Chess.com's membership went past 140 million worldwide, which represents a 355% increase since January 2020, with 150,000 new users registered each day. The site also had more than 57 million monthly active users playing 840 million games during the month, up 550% since January 2020. Chess.com is the 114th-ranked site on the internet.
Across nearly every metric, the figures have gone through the roof—even leading to some embarrassing outages at the start of the year as Chess.com’s servers struggled to cope.
The list of celebrity chess fans who have talked about playing chess recently reads like a who’s who of popular culture. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Howard Stern, Will Smith, Ben Affleck, Woody Harrelson; the list goes on.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is very serious about chess, and his son-in-law Chris Pratt has yet to beat him! ♟ https://t.co/Y4xHwSq2dp
— ExtraTV (@extratv) May 21, 2023
It has even been reported that playing chess has become so popular in classrooms that the use of Chess.com has been banned by some school districts in Utah. The New York Times also reported on Chess.com’s “Stealth Campaign That’s Getting Your Kids Hooked On Chess.”
“We make no apology for trying to make chess popular!” said Erik. “It’s what we always set out to do and what we work hard at every day, to grow the game.”
College friends Erik and Jay bought the Chess.com domain for $55,000 in 2005 with the aim of creating the world’s best online chess community. Following its acquisition of the Play Magnus Group last year, Chess.com now employs more than 650 remote workers.
Its ecosystem includes ChessKid, the dedicated site for juniors, Learn Chess with Dr. Wolf, Chessable, chess24, Aimchess, the Play Magnus suite of apps, and the Magnus Chess Academy.
