Chatrandom is a live video chat site that has grown in popularity massively over the last year. In fact, it’s grown so much in comparison to Sean Parker’s failure Airtime, that people like this Venturebeat Blogger are really starting to take notice. It’s kind of funny really, some unknowns beating out the famous billionaire and all his celebrity friends. It just goes to show that money and fame can’t fix a bad idea, bad business model, or poor execution. But why is Chatrandom winning the war? For starters, it could be anonymity. You see, Airtime requires you to connect your Facebook profile to your chatting persona. The anonymous nature of Chatroulette, in my opinion, is a huge part of what propelled it to the success it became. Chatrandom followed suit by maintaining anonymity, and Airtime did not. The loss of randomly being connected with anonymous users decreases the level of excitement, and makes people a bit anxious since they feel much more “watched”, if you will. Also, I think people like to have a certain level of separation between their internet activities and their real life activities, and Facebook is essentially part of their real life.

At any rate, it’s not just the anonymity that has made Chatrandom successful, since obviously they have to have a great set of features as well – and they do. First they have the typical roulette live webcam chat room, which runs smoothly on quick servers, and always has plenty of fresh faces online – you won’t be running into the same person more than once, unless you get lucky. Second, they have a chat rooms option. Each room has a max of 200 users, and many of them are completely or almost completely full. Once you’re in a room, you have the option to broadcast a live video feed / watch other feeds or stick to private video calls. Or, you can just stick text-only. But wait, the site has yet another third choice to satisfy your chatting needs. This one is called “multi chat” and it also has multiple rooms. This choice is more focused on putting on a live show and building up viewers, so you can see a listing of all the usernames and how many people are viewing each live cam feed. You can watch as many as four cams at once, as well as broadcast your own. If all this sounds cool, visit Chatrandom at www.chatrandom.com.