A short history of random video chat: from Chatroulette and Omegle to today
Talking to random strangers online is older than video. But in 2009 two websites, built by teenagers on opposite sides of the world, turned it into a cultural phenomenon. Here's how it happened, what went wrong, and what it means for random chat today.
Before video: chat rooms and IRC
From the late 1980s, people met strangers online in text: on bulletin board systems, then Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels, and in the 1990s in the chat rooms of services such as AOL and Yahoo. "A/S/L?" (age, sex, location) became the internet's most famous opening line. These spaces were grouped by topic or region, so you chose who you might meet. Webcams existed, but they were expensive, grainy and awkward to set up.
By the late 2000s several things had changed at once: laptops shipped with built-in webcams, home broadband was fast enough for video, and browser plug-ins like Adobe Flash could access the camera. The stage was set for something simpler than a chat room: one button, one stranger.
2009: Omegle
Omegle launched in March 2009, built by Leif K-Brooks, then an 18-year-old in Vermont, USA. The idea was radically simple: no sign-up, no profile, no choosing. You pressed a button and were paired with a random stranger for an anonymous text chat, labelled only "You" and "Stranger". A video mode followed in 2010, and over the years Omegle added interest tags to pair people who listed the same topics, and a moderated video section.
Omegle's slogan, "Talk to strangers!", captured both its appeal and its risk. For more than a decade it was one of the best-known sites on the internet, especially among young people, and it remained largely a one-person operation for most of its life.
Late 2009: Chatroulette
In November 2009 Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old in Moscow, launched Chatroulette. It went straight to video: your webcam on one side, a random stranger's on the other, and a "Next" button to spin again. Within a few months it was a global news story, with media reports in early 2010 of around a million or more users a day, and "chat roulette" became the generic name for the whole genre.
Chatroulette also became the first big lesson in moderation. Because anyone could appear with a single click, a significant share of users encountered nudity and explicit behaviour, and the site's popularity dropped sharply once that reputation set in. Later versions experimented with registration, automated filters and moderation to win people back.
The 2010s: clones, regions and mobile
Success brought copies. Dozens of sites offered the same "camera plus Next button" formula, some focused on particular countries or languages (France's Bazoocam was an early example), others adding features such as gender filters, country filters or virtual gifts, often behind a paywall.
When smartphones took over, random video chat moved into apps. Azar, launched in South Korea in 2014, popularised swipe-to-skip video matching with built-in translation. Monkey, launched in 2016, targeted a younger audience with short timed calls. Others, such as HOLLA and OmeTV, followed. Mobile apps brought front cameras, push notifications and app-store rules about content and age, which forced more structured moderation.
2020–2021: the lockdown boom
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, with people stuck at home and short of company, random video chat had a dramatic revival. Omegle's traffic surged, helped by streamers and short clips of funny encounters on TikTok and YouTube. The renewed attention also brought scrutiny: investigations by journalists, including a 2021 BBC report, described minors on the platform and explicit content, and child-safety organisations raised the alarm.
2023: Omegle closes
On 8 November 2023 Omegle shut down. Its homepage was replaced by a long statement from Leif K-Brooks explaining that running the site was no longer sustainable, financially or psychologically, given the cost and stress of fighting misuse. The closure came while Omegle faced a product-liability lawsuit in the United States. Its users scattered across dozens of alternatives, and "Omegle" is still searched for millions of times a month by people looking for something similar. We cover the closure itself in more detail in what happened to Omegle.
What the genre learned
Fifteen years of random chat leave a fairly clear list of what makes it work, and what breaks it:
- Simplicity is the magic. The appeal of one button and one stranger has never gone away. Every extra step before the first call loses people.
- Moderation decides a platform's fate. Chatroulette's decline and Omegle's closure both trace back to misuse. Clear rules, real reporting and bans that stick aren't optional extras.
- Age boundaries matter. Mixing adults and children in anonymous video chat caused the genre's worst harms. Separating audiences, and enforcing it, is essential.
- Easy exits are a safety feature. An instant Next button and a block that prevents re-matching protect people better than any warning text.
- Privacy has improved. Modern browsers connect calls with encrypted, peer-to-peer WebRTC, so there's no need for a service to see or record calls at all.
- Honesty about size builds trust. Fake online counters and bots posing as people have been a recurring problem; users notice.
Random chat today
Today's random video chats run in the browser without plug-ins and on phones as apps, with interest matching, voice-only modes, translation and in-app safety tools that early sites never had. OMG Chat is one of them: an independent, adults-only random video chat that tries to keep Omegle's one-tap simplicity while learning from its mistakes. You can read about our approach on the About page and our safety page, or see how the technology works in how random video chat works.