Why isn't Chess.com on the stock market?

Chess popularity is not slowing down. Chess.com gets about 100,000 new members a day. It's a known fact that chess is booming so much that the Chess.com servers sometimes have trouble keeping up with so much traffic. Going public and having such an influx in capital would enable the site to invest in their infrastructure and be ahead of demand for years to come. So why isn't Chess.com on the stock market? Is there any indication that they will become publicly traded in the near future?

that's because chess . com is just for chess people

@erik has posted before somewhere that there are no plans to ever go public.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/erik-from-chess-com-here-ask-me-almost-anything?page=13#comment-27520592

although chess.com locks most of its features behind a paywall... To maximise profits

Which in turn enables them to deliver quality services.

I'm sure if the site wanted to, they could modify offerings and pricing to maximize profit. The subscription pricing changed for the first time in 14 years, less than a year ago, to support continuing growth of the site.

As a private company, the site can use profits to improve services, support and sponsor other chess related things (tournaments, events, etc), and other outreach instead of funneling profits to the market investors.

Same here. My money is just sitting here, lol.

I love chess, but I wouldn’t put my money into it, even with the boom. This site probably isn’t on the stock market because staying private gives them way more control over where their money goes.

Check out Erik's interviews in https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general-chess-discussion/erik-allebest-interview-on-scaling-to-100m-revenue-150m-members-and-700-people-99989457

They accepted some investment from someone who said they were in it for the long haul and then later on said they needed to get out. And then that next person said they were in and then turned around and said they wanted to get out. What external equity people have is fro dealing with that change of sentiment and Chess.co isn't going any further down that path, having been burned by it before.

Some of the more recent interviews mentioned that becoming public might be something for the future, though it's not actively being pursued.