I think it's because of the audience. E-sports has a way bigger audience than CP and I feel people who have no idea about cp will probably think that CP is like studying rather than enjoying and hence they might think its not entertaining.Bigger audience will bring in more sponsers and hence more money for the players.

Bruh. Coders already have a very bad reputation of being nerds who remain locked up in their rooms and staring at their computer screens for 12 hours a day.

CP isn't perceived to be as glorious as chess by the society. (PS: I haven't even told my parents what I do exactly sitting for hours and hours on my PC.)

I am totally happy with it being an obscure e-sport. :)

What can be done to increase this?

Organize a contest and give big prizes.

Or if you want to help a little bit: follow and watch CP events. The bigger the audience, the better.

I think if CP were to become very popular, everyone would be more attracted to the speedforces aspects of it. Just look at tmw's kickstart round A video last year; it went viral because of his insane speedforces. I doubt many people would want to watch people sitting down for hours trying to solve 4-5 problems, but it would be more interesting to see them do it over the span of 20-30 minutes, just by the nature of the latter being a lot more volatile. Many upsets can happen, which is something people really like to see. Even I have to admit it's more fun watching speedforces than slowforces.

Because everyone is already rich.

Because there is no difference between watching tourist submit E and watching me play Codeforces simulator.

Because watching paint dry is more entertaining than a bunch of scrawny dudes typing text onto a screen

I want to say that as Errichto says that should watch CP events but i think is it really fun to watch others coding ???? I mean how can it be ?

people in many countries don't even know what cp is before attending to college (maybe less than 5% of em knew). I somehow clicked on a video of william lin (I used to do web dev and programming so it poped up in yt suggestion).now I stopped doing web dev,gaming and started doing cp and I watch streams of Errichto, tourist,william lin even if I don't understand a thing what they are doing(I barely can solve div2A div2B) I fell in love with it. Before January I din't even know that something called CP existed lol.There are many people like me who will enjoy if we can make them engage in this that way we can increase the audience of CP

There were a lot of comparasions with chess in comments.

I think that chess is more popular than CP just for one main reason: in chess, you can see the progress of the game: the position, the moves. In CP you can only see the result: task is done or not done. And watching how somebody stare at the screen and typing the text is pretty boring.

Because it is not a brain-sport. Chess and Go have a set playstyle. In CP you most of the times apply things you already know (thats the definition of algorithm). This is definitely not as exciting. There is not the factor "talent" as in Go and chess where you can be totally new to the game and still beat strong players.

I think a differnt form of cp can be made proper esport like lockout tournament(organised by neal,errichto,sorry if I have forgotten other name) ,,Also Cp with less problem on advanced algorithm nd more on logic building can be popularised easily,I believe cp can be easily popularised if some big cpeer really wants to promote.

And there are two reasons supporting this: 1st)India and china are biggest nation in term of population and people in both nation knows what cp is and In India more and more people started knowing cp,although some of them needs some guidance to look upon cp in right waays 2)Cp is already fun even in this form.I love watching demoralizer stream and In lockout I was genuinely supporting ecnerwala whole time

Answer is simple. It should entertain it's audience. Do you love watching Um_nik's stream for hours? xD. Kidding. Don't take it serious Alex :)

Because everyone knows only tourist wins and he's rich xD.

Here's some random thoughts on this topic.

I think in order to become popular as an esport-type thing, CP would somehow have to attract casuals, i.e. people who have no idea what's going on, but who are still interested in watching. And at the moment, there really isn't anything to watch — F5ing a scoreboard is really, really boring.

Can this be changed? Maybe.

Chess was mentioned a lot — I think it shows that people will watch just about anything, as long as there's something to watch. I mean, it's a 2D black-and-white board that is static for most of the time, and sometimes for very long consecutive periods of time. People still watch, even though few can really appreciate what's going in a match between grandmasters — they can still admire that the players are really smart and that probably great moves are happening and if there's an experienced caster telling that a certain move was genius, they can be entertained.

So for CP, we would need to give viewers something to watch. Maybe one approach would be some way of visualizing solutions. Some problems are about controlling some agent(s) and making it (them) do smart decisions and perform smart actions — if the actions of the agent(s) can be visualized nicely, I think this can be entertaining even for casuals. They may not know what the algorithm is really doing, but they may still recognize and appreciate that the agent(s) is (are) displaying intelligent behavior. For example, problems similar to some of the past Google Hash Code problems might be suitable here, like drones delivering packets, cabs moving through cities, robotic arms trying to grab things, etc...

But of course, the problems that can be nicely visualized (and in reasonable time) constitute only a very tiny fraction of current CP problems. Moreover, writing the software for cool visualizations requires a lot of effort. So while I think that some flashy stuff to look at is the best way to get people watching and interested, it will be very hard to do so with the current state of CP. Maybe some other version, more tailored towards programming intelligent agents to do something and possibly even directly competing with each other, as described above, would have more potential. But then again, that would be quite dissimilar from traditional CP.

As it was mentioned a lot already, the reason for no money is no viewers (from whom potential sponsors could get revenue), and the reason for no viewers is that it's not interesting to follow the competition. One thing that wasn't mentioned is that there is no direct confrontation between participants, you just try to do your best and then the results are compared. Then, there is no "game state" to watch, as most of the work is done inside one's brain. It's even hard to commentate on because it's hard to grasp what do people code sometimes. Maybe it's partially solvable by introducing different formats, like Lockout. Maybe it's time someone organises another big Lockout tournament?