Sunday, March 28, 2010

Marketing Chatroulette

Chatroulette’s creator, 17 year-old Andrey Ternovskiy, has received offers from web industry giants like Facebook and Google for his site but is shopping around before saying yes to anyone. Ternovskiy could easily sell Chatroulette today for $1 million if he so desired. Since its inception, Chatroulette has spawned dozens of similar anonymous video chat sites but in Jennifer Van Grove’s post, “Why Chatroulette Is More than Just Penises,” she touches upon several reasons why companies like Facebook and Google have their eyes specifically on Chatroulette:


  • Attention. The sheer amount of media coverage, both good and bad, given to Chatroulette has branded it as the “go-to” place for anonymous video chat.
  • Fun Factor Monetization. Much like Rock Band or Wii video games, Chatroulette’s novel enhancement to the collective entertainment experience has Lolcat’s money making potential in a entertainment-only web market.
  • Future Marketing Potential. Chatroulette has recently started to auto-generate subdomains as a means to target niche audiences (Cleva girl…).
The most interesting point I found was number 3. The first thing I thought of when experiencing the fun - and sometimes uncomfortable - roulette experience was how could this site make money? How is this a useful tool for marketing? Enter custom roulette. This is how it works: 

If, say, you only wanted to video chat with Angelinos, you type, www.losangeles.chatroulette.com and viola! You’re now in roulette with folks interested in Los Angeles. Want it even more specific? Type, www.santamonica.chatroulette.com or www.apoc.chatroulette.com and boom, your connected with folks with similar interests. And because it’s auto-generating, you don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s been created because you just created it!

The only problem with custom roulette is that not many people know about it. Hence, you may not find anyone to chat with, (I can see no APOCians are online now) but I think it’s only a matter of time before it catches on.

No wonder Facebook and Google are making offers; with such powerful tools, the site has tremendous marketing potential - provided that people continue to use it of course.

Here's a "movie" on Chatroulette. Its pretty much an intro to the site, but interesting and well done:

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6 comments:

  1. UnknownMarch 28, 2010 at 9:16 PM

    Awesome post! I can't stop smiling about the idea of APOCians using a customized roulette!! It is so interesting that in all the filtering of the web to find what's relevant, that we're so fascinated by the random...

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  2. Julie E.March 29, 2010 at 10:09 AM

    Good video! And I didn't know about specifying locations for Chat Roulette. I think I'll still stay away from it though...

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  3. AnonymousApril 1, 2010 at 10:02 PM

    that's pretty amazing. A lot of those functions are currently being served by the likes of Ustream. I wonder how threatened they are by Chatroulette.

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  4. Ruby_C_ZhangApril 10, 2010 at 5:08 PM

    Julie,
    you must get really terrified by the first time you opened it! haha! I was there witnessing that moment!

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  5. Ruby_C_ZhangApril 10, 2010 at 5:17 PM

    I really like the subdomain idea of Chatroulette,kinda like when people enter a night club, they are expecting something unexpected but would not want things to be too wild, certain control of what you get into definitely helps a lot in a uncertain environment.

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  6. EnlacalleApril 12, 2010 at 11:27 AM

    It shows that when you have a good product, you can find ways to monetize it.

    ReplyDelete

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