“Still, [Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy] said, ‘How can you be dead when your revenue has doubled?’

The answer was lazy, simple, and ingenious—in other words, pure Ternovskiy. He started redirecting pantless visitors to Hustler’s Web site, and their computers would forever be blocked from Chatroulette. At first, Ternovskiy and his colleagues were banning a hundred thousand users a day, but now, he says, the flasher rate is down to one in two hundred—and Hustler pays for the referrals, giving Ternovskiy’s company, at least for the time being, a healthy revenue stream.”

–Some have claimed that Chatroulette is dead, but it may have just discovered how to save journalism.

(via The New Yorker’s piece on the future of Chatroulette)

The Andrey Ternovskiy infatuation tour continues: Since the creator of Chatroulette unmasked himself as a 17-year-old high school student from Moscow, he’s drawn considerable attention from the likes of The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and even venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who’s expressed interest in investing in Chatroulette.

Now, Ternovskiy is the subject of one of The New Yorker‘s trademark 4,000-word profiles. There aren’t any massive new revelations here — though 4chan types may find some glee in learning that Ternovskiy first cut his teeth on DDoS attacks when he was 11 — but it’s a fascinating read about a fascinating figure.

Andrey Ternovskiy, the 17-year-old Russian high school student responsible for Chatroulette, is kind of a big deal. He was last sighted at the Palo Alto Apple Store at 4 AM last Saturday, waiting in line for, of course, the iPad, flanked by a few investors and writing code for the site that so famously has scared reporters with happily flaunted male genitalia. Geek rock star at work.

This past Friday, German paper Der Spiegel ran the first-ever in-depth profile of Andrey Ternovskiy, the creator of Chatroulette. It’s a fascinating read — and all of today’s Chatroulette trend piece writers should make a note of Ternovskiy’s stated long-term goal of “keeping the ‘freaks and f***ers,’ as he calls them, off the site.”

The piece focuses on the battle between Russia and the U.S.A. over smart, talented tech entrepreneurs, and makes the point that if Russia loses the Ternovskiys of the world (and, by extension, the Chatroulettes of the world), it’s already lost the next round of the tech war.

All of which is well, good, and abstract, but the writer saves his biggest bombshell for the end of the narrative profile: Andrey Ternovskiy is applying for a visa to come the U.S.A.

Sketch comedy group DrCoolSex has answered, in mockumentary form, the question that we wonder about most these days: what, exactly goes on in Chatroulette’s offices? NSFW.

Over at the New York Times online, the Bits blog has scored a statement from this week’s biggest internet celeb: the creator of random video chat phenomenon Chatroulette. According to the report, the man behind the magic is Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old high school student from Moscow.

The bizarre and purposefully invasive service pairs strangers for a two-way chat through web cams, allowing either user to move on to a new partner with the quick click of a button. The result is a lot of sad dorm rooms, shirtless men in bed and the occasional naked exhibitionist. The subject of rabid media attention over the last ten days, Chatroulette has between 10,000 and 50,000 users live at any moment throughout the day and is the momentary hottest in a wave of online social experimentation from Omegle to Google Buzz.