Chatroulette found itself with a surplus of naked men, so founder Andrey Ternovskiy figured out how to get rid of them while turning a profit.
TechCrunch crunched the numbers and found that 89% of Chatroulette users are male, and 1 in 8 chats on the site contain material that would be at least rated R (read: naked people). That might account for the site’s sharp drop in traffic. 18 year old founder Andrey Ternovskiy turned naked men into money, telling Fast Company, “Everyday, about 50,000 new men are trying to get naked. What we’re doing is selling the naked men to a couple of websites.”
Here’s how it works. Users on Chatroulette can now control the content they receive by flagging chat partners as displaying inappropriate content. Once a user receives a certain amount of flags, they’re banned from the site for forty minutes. Instead of just kicking the offending user off the site, Chatroulette redirects them to an adult website; the adult site, in turn, pays Chatroulette for the referral.
When Chatroulette first came on the scene, Ternovskiy was besieged with offers to buy the innovative site, and turned them all down. The offers dropped off with the drop in traffic, but the content control system has already yielded positive results. The rerouting of naked men has also made Chatroulette about $100,000 a month.
Source: Fast Company, via Geek
