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Chatroulette: Sensation or fad?
February 19, 2010
The water cooler talk on Monday morning was about a new site people had discovered called Chatroulette – a website that allows random strangers to talk face to face via webcam. Within days we had discovered articles in the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning-Herald, the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and then yesterday my colleague, Robin Goad, in the UK ,beat me to the punch providing some statistical background of the web sites rise in prominence in the UK.
Online global sensations are far and few between and there is no guarantee whether Chatroulette is a flash in the pan novelty or whether it can be leveraged into a longer term idea of substance. This is a smart piece of hacking / mashing from a Russian teenager that makes use of Skype to connect people around the world, and as the name suggests, it is a bit of a roulette gamble on the strangers you’ll connect to via your webcam.
The chart below highlights the accelerated growth as the word started to spread, and a media driven peak on 16 February. Chatroulette currently stands as the 481th ranked website visited by Australian Internet users (17 February 2010), down from the peak of 356 the previous day and the number two webcam website behind Coastal Watch.
As reported in Robin’s blog, the UK profile of Chatroulette’s audience are wealthier and more sophisticated compared to the general visitor to the webcam industry. A similar trend has emerged in Australia with the three wealthier profiled Mosaic Groups being highly over indexed against the Australian online population – Privileged Prosperity (The most affluent families in the mist desirable locations), Academic Achiever (Wealthy areas of educated professional households) and Young Ambition (Educated and high-earning young singles and sharers in the inner suburbs).
Last week (week ending 13 February 2010) Search Engines and Social Networking and Forums were the main drivers of visits to Chatroulette, delivering 76.3% of upstream traffic (Search Engines 38.4% and Social Networking and Forums 37.9%) with Blogs and Personal Websites being the third highest upstream provider with 4.2%.
The novelty already may be wearing off for Chatroulette as average visit times have dropped from a peak of 14 minutes 25 seconds in the week ending 2 January 2010, to 6 minutes 38 seconds last week (although an increase on the previous week). The peak in January was more than likely driven by the holiday period, with users having more spare time to surf the web for entertainment whereas the lower average visit time experienced last week may be impacted by Australian time zones.
Whether Chatroulette will be a global sensation or a passing fad is sure to become clearer in the weeks ahead.
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Posted by Alan Long at 02:14 PM
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In Categories Entertainment | Video
