Chatroulette

Chatroulette is a video-conferencing website that spontaneously connects strangers from around the globe using web cameras and chat rooms. The site pairs users randomly, and they can keep clicking "next" to shuffle through different users until they are satisfied with their pairing. This is called being "nexted."

History

The website was first launched on November 2009 by a 17 year old student in high school in Moscow, Russia named Andrey Ternovsky.^[1] The source of his idea for Chatroulette came from the various video chats he had with his friends on the Skype platform. The name was picked after Ternovsky watched the "The Deer Hunter," a film that depicted prisoners of war being forced to play the game "Russian roulette."^[2] When the site first launched in November 2009, it registered approximately 500 visitors per day.^[3] One month later, this number jumped to 50,000. ^[4] By the beginning of March, Chatroulette boasted a user-base of approximately 1.5 million users.^[5] 33% of them were from the United States and 5% from Germany.^[6] Ternovsky ran the site from his bedroom, working alongside four programmers who were working virually. The site's main source of income came through advertising links to a online dating service. ^[7]

Demographics

In a study done by Tech Crunch done in March 2010, it showed that approximately 50% of all Chatroulette spins resulted in connecting a user with someone in the USA. The next most likely country was France with 15%. The study furthermore indicated that on average in sessions with only one person in the frame, 89% of the time these users were male and only 11% were female. 8% of the spins showed multiple people in the webcam frame. The likelihood of females appearing in a group is 1 in 3, but for males it is 1 in 12. A user was apparently more likely to come across a session that featured no person in the frame at all than a session with only one female. 1 in 8 chat sessions were found to have objectionable content. The study further broke down the "pervert rate" by country, and the United Kingdom outranks all other countries with a "pervert concentration" of 22%. ^[8]

Media appearances

The New York Times
The New Yorker
New York magazine
Good Morning America
Newsnight
Tosh.0
The Daily Show with Job Stewart

Criticism

Because Chatroulette doesn't require user registration, there has been a lot of criticism surrounding the web-conferencing site. The site has developed a reputation for displaying lewd acts in chat sessions, and is often a platform for "cyber sex". This has especially drew a lot of attention in the media, because of the lack of enforcement on age restrictions. In CNET news, an article warns parents to be wary of Chatroulette's alarming images and indecent exposure. ^[9]