French Chatroulette clone launches a gay version, Camtogays

Yes, that’s right – we’re talking about the launch of yet another Chatroulette site. Andrey Turnovisky’s successful idea, which has over 4 million monthly unique visitors, has set off a wave of copycats around the world – with Bazoocam (previously Chatroulettefr.org) and Camtoya amongst the leaders in the French market.

But it gets better. Only 2 months after Bazoocam’s official launch and the team is already announcing a gay version of the site: Camtogays. This new site went live on May 4th and will be monetized with localized, targeted ads in partnership with the dating site Easyflirt. However, the founders and planning to eventually develop and integrate their own dating platform into the site as the traffic picks up.

Ah, but Camtogays is hardly the first gay Chatroulette site – in fact, one of the first gay Chatroulette sites, Manroulette, was launched in March. However, Camtogays is hoping not to become a hot-spot for vulgarity and obscenity and has thus introduced a number of tools to help users to report and eliminate inappropriate content – the same tools that have helped Bazoocam show 15% less genitals than the original Chatroulette site, according to the founders. Clean Chatroulette? We’ll just have to see about that.

With the launch of Camtogays, Bazoocam is obviously hoping to gain a bit of leeway in the French market against the other leader Camtoya. Bazoocam currently counts roughly 1.3 million unique visitors per month – yet Camtoya sees around 60,000 visitors per day. And Camtoya seems to have somewhat of a different development strategy – its 23 year old founder, Sébastien Hautier, is planning to develop a social network around the webcam-oriented site. Both companies are also in the process of developing their mobile applications and Bazoocam’s iPhone app should be released next month.

Even if we were hoping that Chatroulette is just a short-lived internet fad, it looks like Chatroulette may be here to stay. We may as well prepare ourselves for the proliferation and diversification of webcam chat sites – perhaps similar to that of social networks. So we’ll just have to wait and see what’s going to be the next niche market to be addressed by a platform à la Chatroulette.