IMHO:
Chaturbate has a unique vibe about it, the people there and the community are for the most part great and unique to CB.
HAVING SAID THAT: CB suffers from all the typical signs of a dot com that's growing faster than their infrastructure can keep up with. E.g. on payout day the interruptions to service and lag times are horrible due to the lack of infrastructure and sharing of back office functionality with the forward facing user site.
The interface is basic for both the performer and user; basically a vanilla install of Flash Media Server and a single chat room. Most of the functionality for the chat is controlled through user contributed apps and bots written in Java Script. It's cool that you can customize that aspect of things if you're tech savvy but quality control is poor and a bunch of the apps have bugs mostly because CB does not provide a test platform for the developers. A few are so bad they have been reported to actually loose a performers tokens (pay) and yet remain active and available for use. MAKE SURE YOU READ THE USER COMMENTS FOR EACH APP AND BOT YOU USE, they can be invaluable especially when your talking about your pay.
- Support: It's almost non-existent, we've tried several times to reach them and have only gotten a response once.
- Billing: There's basically NO self serve user interface so ANY changes have to be done manually by CB. Changing billing preferences can ONLY be done by sending confidential information through email. The 3rd party payment processing vendors serve only to process CC transactions, all manipulation of stored data has to be done through CB support, who are impossible to reach. Even Epoch and the other vendors they use do not have any way to reach CB via phone, only a support email. So again, you have to resort to sending confidential information through email for example to change your payout method from Check to Direct Deposit. CC numbers can only be changed by PURCHASING tokens and using the new CC, by doing this you automatically update the CC they have on file for you. In other words, if you want to update your CC, it's gonna cost you at least US $10.
- Payouts on tokens is US $0.05 period on tips. I think it's US $0.065 on a couple of the affiliate related transactions.
- Their Terms of Service are not clear on a few points and they are quick to ban you for minor infractions that are not clearly defined in the terms of service. For example, in our case - when we first started on CB we would do some LONG broadcasts i.e. 8,12, 16, 24 hr hits we're typical. Every few hours or so we take a 10-15 min break to have a smoke, hit the can, wash the baby oil off, have a drink, ya know, a short break... We would run video through our cam feed while we did this, video of us, homemade stuff from other broadcasts that we owned, no copyright infringement or anything like that going on and it was at the request of our fans. They did not want us to shut the feed down and come back. WELL, the CB nazi's did not like this at all and shut us down for 48 hours. I questioned them and advised they should update their terms of service which only state not to broadcast any material that violates a copyright or someone else's ownership. Well in fact this is not accurate at all as it turns out. When we finally returned to broadcasting and our regulars asked what had happened it came out from a lot of other users that others had been banned for simply stepping away from the cam to use the bathroom for less than 5 minutes. Apparently CB's policy is that if your are not actively in front of the camera every second you're in violation, the expectation is that you're to shut the broadcast down and start it back up again even if you're only stepping away for a few minutes. And ya know, that's fine, I get it, but don't say one thing in your terms of service but mean something else then take such rash and harsh action against us for it. How about a warning first ya know...
- Search filters are VERY limited and have odd parameters. Personally we find a static filter to return for example ALL 30-50 year olds (M, F, CPL, TS) is too broad and too general.
- Non paying users outnumber paying users by probably about 20:1. They allow non-registered users on a non-interactive basis.
- The sign-up and verification process was real simple and real fast, almost instant when you submit your documents. Unlike a few other sites that can take WEEKS to verify you.
- There is absolutely no way to interact with other users or for them to interact with you while you are off the air. Users have the option of 'following' you and you can send a generic bulk email (that you can not customize) to all them prior to your broadcast but no sooner than every 6 hours. You will need to direct fans to off site email or things like twitter if they wish to be informed/in touch outside of your broadcasts. For whatever reason this doesn't seem very effective and even through we do it from the hand full of users we've researched doing this the turn-around seems to only be about 1%. IMHO, makes it kinda of difficult to establish a regular and consistent fan base especially if you do not keep a rigid, visible schedule.
- The whole interface is real basic & different from most cam sites, has almost a mom & pop home-spun sort of feel to it. It's neither good nor bad, it just is what it is.
All in all we like CB, it's kind of our 'back-stage' performance venue where we cut up and just have fun with it, don't take it too seriously.
-VV // Odin & Ariel