Chatroulette Flasher Traffic Redirected to Hustler?

CYBERSPACE—No one is really confirming that it is so, and the original report that said it was so has backed off from its original claim (sort of), but Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy has reportedly come up with a great way to discourage males from flashing random video chatters by redirecting them to an adult site, and the site may belong to Hustler.

The New Yorker originally reported the new tactic, but a funny thing happened to the Hustler reference: it was changed to read “an adult website.” However, the change also had an asterisk next to it that informed readers that “An earlier version of this post named Hustler as Ternovskiy’s partner,” so who really knows?

It’s also unclear why a traffic deal between Chatroulette and an adult site would be such a big secret, since, as The New Yorker writer noted, the solution that Ternovskiy came up with to deal with “lewd” Chatroulette users was “lazy, simple, and ingenious—in other words, pure Ternovskiy.” One possible reason is that Chatroulette is a free site, open to people of all ages. But the same holds true for all free sites, so that doesn't make much sense.

AVN contacted Hustler for comment, but company president Michael Klein declined to confirm the traffic partnership. He was also asked if Hustler had anything to do with The New Yorker altering its story, and said that it had not. So a small mystery remains unsolved.

Still, Chatroulette remains a potentially potent traffic source with 500,000 visitors each day, according to Ternovskiy. That’s down from its reported high of 2 million a day, but it's still nothing to sneeze at, assuming the "bad" traffic can be redirected to the right place. Sending flashers to an adult site seems reasonable enough, though maybe a dating site makes as much sense, assuming the blokes are looking to hook up.

It looks as if the Chatroulette flashers will just have to settle for wherever they wind up, but it shouldn't be a problem. After all, the whole point of Chatroulette is that you never really know what you’re going to see; now, if you’re a flasher, you won’t know where you’re going to be sent. Seems fair enough.