Chatting via internet has become immensely popular with the advent of webcams which provide the facility to see each other while chatting. A webcam is a video camera that operates by feeding its images in real time to a personal computer or laptop, via an Ethernet, USB or WI-Fi. Chat Chatroulette is a website which pairs strangers from all over the world for conversation based on webcam.

Chat can be abandoned at any point by either user by simply disconnecting with the other person randomly. This website was created by a 17-year-old student of high school whose name is AndreyTernovskiy from Moscow, Russia. He said this concept rose from video chats which he used to do with some of his friends on Skype a software application and is used to make video and voice calls on the Internet. He says, he wrote the initial version of this website in just two nights and two days. He chose this name while watching the movie ‘The Deer Hunter' in the year 1978. This movie was set in the Vietnam War where prisoners of war were made to play “Russian roulette”.

The site had 500 visitors per day, in early November of 2009, shortly after it was launched. After a month, the number swelled to 50,000. The site has found mention in New York Magazine, New York Times, New Yorker, Newsnight in U.K. and Good Morning America. By the month of February in 2010, at any given time, around 35,000 people can be found on Chatroulette. Since , the beginning of March, the site was estimated to attract almost 1.5 million users, around 33% from United States of America and 5% were from Germany.

Ternovskiy's parents funded his site initially with an investment of $10,000 which he returned very soon. In March 2010, Ternovskiy was working on his site right from his bedroom where he spent his childhood with assistance of four programmers who worked from remote locations and his site was supported by putting advertising links on it on an online dating service. As an informal study suggests, almost half of the Chatroulette spins had the chance of connecting the user with someone in USA, while the next possibility was France. Among the people chatting, in sessions featuring a single person, males were 89% and females were 11%.

However, 1 out of 8 feeds on Chat Chatroulette involved “R-rated” content. To curb this malice, website made the user's age 18 mandatory and prohibited pornographic content or behaviour.