Who Will Be The New Content King Of Chess In 2023?

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. There are reportedly over 51 million channels on YouTube as of 2022, out of which 15 million are active (source: tubics.com).  Succeeding in such a highly saturated platform is no easy task. YouTube Gold Play Button is only awarded to that handful of super successful content creators who have captured the hearts and minds of at least 1 million subscribers. To achieve success, the content creator must choose a niche they are passionate about and consistently create engaging and valuable content for a long time.

GothamChess, ChessTalk, GMHikaru and Agadmator are some such content creators in the chess niche. Chess is a game loved by millions of people worldwide and has seen a huge boom in the last few years due to the success of Queen’s Gambit Netflix mini-series and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this article, we compare and contrast the success of several top chess YouTube channels and try to forecast what is likely to happen in 2023. We will answer questions like whether there will be a new content king, who has the highest growth and what milestones to expect by the end of next year.

Data Gathering and Transformation

First, we decided on 6 top chess YouTube channels. They are GothamChess, Chess Talk, GMHikaru, Agadmator, BotezLIve and ChessBase India. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of channels with over 1 million subscribers, but we made sure that we included the top 4.

Second, we created a time series of subscriber counts from September 2021 to November 2022. The raw data did not have contiguous dates, so data had to be transformed and gap-filled to create a proper time series for comparisons.

Results and Findings

The chart below shows subscriber count breakdowns of selected YouTube channels.

Agadmator was the content king for many years on YouTube, however as shown in the graph by mid-September 2021 GothamChess overtook him and never looked back. GMHikaru was the closed third but in February 2021, GMHikaru surpasses Agadmator and becomes the second-largest YouTube channel. The landscape did not change for a while until July 2022 when the Chess Talk YouTube channel run by Jeetendra Advani from India overtook Agadmator.

Forecast

Now we have reviewed what happened in 2022. The biggest question is who will be the biggest content creator and what other major events can we expect in 2023. For this, we used time series data and tried to create forecast models for each channel of interest. The figure below shows the forecasted subscriber count against each YouTube channel.

From the chart, it is highly likely that there will not be a new content king in 2023. GothamChess will likely continue his dominance and be the first chess content creator to reach 2 million subscribers by March- April 2023. The other significant events could be Chess Talk overtaking GMHikaru to gain the second biggest YouTuber title in chess and the Botez sisters surpassing ChessBase India. GothamChess has the highest growth rate followed by Chess Talk and BotezLive.

We would like to congratulate and crown Levy Rozman creator of GothamChess as the chess content king of YouTube for 2023 and for many years to come. The big question is who will be his challenger? 

About the Author: zeroblunders.com is an apparel company that offers creative and unique designs focused on Chess. Our mission is to show our passion for chess and its lifestyle by producing clothing that ultimately promotes chess. If you live within 64 squares, we hope our designs will allow you to showcase your dedication outside of it.

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