At that point, the site was still running on a server located in a high school student’s bedroom, but with 4 remote programmers hired to help. Four months after launch, Ternovsky revealed that the site had 1.5 million users, with about 35,000 using it at any given moment. The concept came about at just the right time and the site got a lot of mainstream media coverage. Within a month, 50,000 people a day were using it. After launch, the site quickly went from having 50 users a day to about 500 per day, strictly via word of mouth. Launched in late 2009, Chat Roulette was created by a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow, Russia named Andrey Ternovsky. This month we’ll take a look at the origins of the original Chat Roulette site and then check out some of the homo alternatives that are still around. There’s something fun and almost addictive about having to constantly decide whether to stick with the current video stream or to click it away (perhaps never to see it again) in hopes that the next one will be better. Nonetheless, chat roulette sites still offer something unique thanks to the way they work. Guys in search of cam sex can easily meet up in normal online chat rooms and then do the video deed privately via Skype or any other video-equipped platform. In addition, many mobile hookup apps now offer video chat as well. In recent years, two-way video chat has been integrated into most IM apps. While there are positives to the login system, the decrease in anonymity that accompanies it likely scared off a lot of former users.Wolf Mendelsohn looks at the history of chat roulette sites and then checks out some modern gay spinoffs.Ģ010 was the year when chat roulette sites had their brief moment in the spotlight, but against the odds the genre itself persists. This of course helped them to overtake Chatroulette, along with other factors such as Chatroulette changing the way their site worked by adding in a login system and what not. Not only that, but they added their own extra features such as moderators to help quell the annoying nudity issue. One such factor is of course, Omegle, which quickly put out its own video chat feature not long after Chatroulette jumped onto the scene. This can be attributed to a lot of different factors. However, Chatroulette today is nowhere near the level of popularity it once was at. So, given the novelty of the concept and the entertainment factor it provided, it was no surprise how quickly Chatroulette rose to massive popularity, but it definitely had a lot of media attention help. You just don’t know what you’re going to get, and you get it instantly, and then you can switch to the next person instantly as well. The impact of such an addition cannot be understated – being able to instantly visualize your chat partner combined with never knowing what you’re going to see next – from pranks to beauty to disgusting scenes. As you might imagine, the addition of video to the random stranger connection concept was huge. Then, all of the sudden, Chatroulette emerged. There were random text chat sites such as Omegle, but none of them had that super important video streaming capability. Once upon a time there were no random video chat room sites on the internet.