Adds on chess.com

Chess.com has been consistently expanding for more than a decade now… it made and makes a ridiculous amount of money (pure profit) without the adds … just based on its premium subscription model which you were convinced to buy because chess.com was a free platform that you got to know PRIMARILY because it was painlessly free. They’ve become a bigger name in the world of chess than FIDE…. Chess Influencers shower them with praise for their role in “popularizing chess, and serving its community worldwide”, although I’m sure they’re paying them behind the scenes for their endorsement. And why not, I always thought; they’re a good business who cares about creating a community out of chess geeks. I am certain that more people know about chess.com today than there are people who know FIDE exists.

To ruin your community’s experience and sell your people for ads, is yet another demonstration of the fact that the businesses we know and love, like chess.com, are ultimately money making machines that are inherently greedy. They’d rather wield their popularity’s influence and the fact that all the friends you like to play with are on the platform to squeeze you out of money. They are milking the game, their users, and their reputation when they, in fact, don’t need to - because they were making A LOT of money before the ads. They’d like to make more of course. To tell me that I must pay to enjoy chess is ludicrous. The alternatives are many, and chess is a known and easy product to replicate …. It’s not like they’re running YouTube on their servers. Congratulations on reaching the beginning of the end.

I’ll never use chess.com again even if they reverse course. I might play with friends every now and then but that’s it.

while I was willing to pay them at some point in the future (I pay too much for digital services everywhere and chess is not that important to me now) because I genuinely believed (past tense) that their business was an added value to society, I’m certainly not willing now. To Lichess we go… might even code up my own platform…

I feel like it’s fair for them to make money off ads like most sites, (by the way it’s spelt ads not adds) but I can get that they are frustrating.

Yes of course. Chess.com actually had to pay millions to keep this site, including your games and this forum, up in working for free. I think it’s only fair you get ads.