Chatroulette's usage may have fallen off a cliff, but the company isn't dead yet, says founder Andrey Ternovskiy in an interview with the New Yorker.

"How can you be dead when your revenue has doubled?" asks Ternovskiy.

Revenue? That's right, revenue. Here's how he's generating some sales:

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.

That said, we have no idea what revenue was beforehand. A dollar? Maybe it's two dollars now? So doubling doesn't mean much, really. And a business model based on banning users for life is problematic.