In the roulette live streaming video chat world, Chatrandom has recently ascended to greatness. It now is pretty much in direct competition with the big boys, Chatroulette and Omegle, and it’s actually gaining on them, slowly but surely. The craziest part about it is they entered the game pretty late compared to most other imitators. A combination of smart marketing and adding new chat room options into the mix seems to have propelled them up to their current #3 or so position, at least popularity-wise. This, of course, is huge, because once a site like this obtains what I like to term a “critical mass” of users, the sky is the limit as to growth. The reason for this is as with any chat site, the number of users has a direct effect upon the experience visitors have and how much they like the site, which then of course has a direct effect upon whether they will come back again, tell their friends, about it, and so on.
In terms of the extra features Chatrandom has on top of the usual random webcam chat, it has a couple more options to choose from. First, it has one it calls “Chat Rooms”. This option leads to a flash-based software application where you can enter different rooms, typically limited to 200 people each, and can view lots of different people on their webcams all at the same time, show your own live feed, have private video calls, or just text chat, all to your heart’s content. There are a lot of other features too, but that’s the general idea, so let’s move on the the next option available. The next option is called “Multi Chat”. This option seems to be more focused on putting on a show more than the ability to have private conversations and what not. You can see how many people are viewing each live video feed, and shift between different rooms. You can of course also put on your own show, and attempt to gain a lot of viewers, etc. A cool part of this chat option is you can watch as many as four different live video streams at the same time. So, if you like what you hear check out Chatrandom at www.chatrandom.com.
So this is actually the site that started it all. Way back on March 25th, 2008, an 18-year-old high school student by the name of Leif K-Brooks founded Omegle, the first (as far as I am aware) true random roulette chat site. No, 
This site really pushed the random chat niche into the forefront with it’s roulette webcam format. Although it doesn’t get credit for coming up with the concept of random stranger one-on-one chatting in the first place (that goes to Omegle), it still deserves a TON of credit for the attention it brought to the category, and the subsequent massive boost in popularity all the sites in the niche received. You see, Chatroulette made the important jump from text-only to video, and the significance of that simply cannot be overstated, it was HUGE. Ask anyone, and the majority will say video chatting is more entertaining than text-only communication, it’s a no-brainer! Anyway, Chatroulette went viral because of the addition of live cam streams, and it was picked up by media outlets all over the globe, propelling it to instant poularity.
Camzap is a pretty popular roulette / random video chat website. I’m not really sure when it was founded, but I do think it was one of the earlier Chatroulette imitators, which worked out to its benefit. Obviously, the earlier you jump into a new niche the easier it is to gain traction, and Camzap seemed to initially focus on or at least somehow attract the entire international market in a somewhat unique way. It doesn’t do very well in the USA, but it does very well in Brazil and Columbia, for example. I don’t know if this was Camzap’s marketing plan from the beginning or what, but it definitely seems to have worked out quite well for them.