GMHikaru vs Magnus Carlsen: Which Chess personality is more popular in 2024?

Hikaru Nakamura, who goes by the online alias GMHikaru, and Magnus Carlsen are arguably the most popular Chess personalities in the world. While former World Champion Carlsen may be one of the most well-known names in the sport, Nakamura has a very strong presence on social media due to him being a full-time streamer on platforms like Kick and Twitch.

Under the alias GMHikaru, he is the most successful non-branded channel on Twitch, and the five-time US Chess Champion boasts about 1.9 million followers. Magnus also has an account on the Amazon-owned platform but rarely uses it. The channel currently has about 300K followers.

With GMHikaru recently taking up a chessboxing challenge from Magnus Carlsen after the latter lied about his possibility of winning on a lie detector YouTube video, let's set aside their skills as chess players and look at who the most popular personality is in 2024.

We have already gone over how Nakamura dominates in terms of followers on Twitch. This speaks a lot about how popular the streamer is in the online chess community. Hikaru is known for breaking down popular games, from historical matches to recent competitions.

He also goes live and interacts with thousands of people in his audience regularly on the website as well as the relatively new streaming platform Kick. This has garnered a bit of backlash from others, with chess players such as Hans Niemann calling him out for doing gambling streams on Kick.

GMHikaru also uploads clips from his streams on YouTube and has over 2.34 million subscribers. In comparison, Magnus Carlsen uploads maybe three or four videos to his official channel in a month and has less than half the subscriber tally at 1.2 million.

That said, as a former World Champion who