What's Inside a Successful Virtual Community Business? The Case of the Internet Chess Club

This paper considers the human and technical components of the business model of a highly successful subscription-based online gaming community, the Internet Chess Club (ICC). After presenting the history of this enterprise and its properties as a research testbed, we review the actors (owners, regular members, volunteers) and the infrastructure to set the stage for a survey (n = 124) of paid subscribers and volunteers to explore participants’ perceptions and their preferred activities inside the community. A principle components factor analysis shows that the respondents can be divided into five subgroups: the Promoters and Community Builders, the Feel-at-Home Comfortable Users, the Addicts, the Socializers, and the Introverted Chess Focus. The success of ICC stems from its support of all of these subgroups, as well as intrinsic factors in its environment that continue to attract volunteers from the regular member corps. Much of ICC’s success that we find in this case follows prescriptive advice from prior virtual community literature, such as improving access to large-scale information resources, facilitating economic transactions, and combating information overload. After discussing the results, we provide directions for further work in this area.