Why Do Magicians Perform On Omegle?

So, this is what happened. I'm jet-lagged. The seventeen-hour two-flight combo I took yesterday has me wiped out. Thankfully, I'd already written today's scheduled article about Spiderman, storytelling, and magic.

But then – just as I went to schedule today's email – I saw the news.

Omegle is no more.

That's right, Omegle, the site that lets you talk to strangers, shut down today as the founder told the world he doesn't want to die of a heart attack in his 30s.

The site has long been riddled with controversy, flooded with underage participants and countless people exposing themselves to strangers.

It's also served as an endless content factory for streamers, internet pranksters, musicians who take requests, and TikTok magicians.

I've wanted to write about Omegle and magicians for over a year.

I first typed the topic idea into my notes in March 2022. It's served as a training ground for magicians who get to perform for an endless stream of bored but often interested participants – and it's easy to stand out amongst all the bored strangers with a deck of cards, a condom trick, or a simple snap change.

And so, I decided to write an entirely new post for today.

We're doing it live, folks!

This is a deep dive into Omegle, how and why TikTok magicians flocked to it, and why their content went so viral. But, we're going to go back to the beginning – 13 years ago, when a very young-looking magic duo, Barry & Stuart, fooled me with a card trick they performed on a similar video chat site.

Fourteen years ago, Omegle was founded by Leif K-Brooks as a way to randomly video chat with strangers on the internet. The site was similar to platforms like Chat Roulette, which had blown up in virality.

Upsettingly, you were very likely to see people exposing themselves on the video calls – but something about the platform, perhaps the random interactions and occasional celebrity cameos, kept it going until today.

Thirteen years ago, magic duo Barry & Stuart posted a new video to their YouTube channel titled: "Barry and Stuart - Internet Magic Revealed". The video is in 360p, which was high quality for YouTube back then. I remember seeing it, I remember watching it, and I invite you to watch it too, below:

Having worked together briefly on Netflix's Magic For Humans and becoming friends with Stuart in recent years, I can tell you I take absolute delight in seeing his jammy little face look all smug when he reveals the method to the viewers.

Barry and Stuart were the first magicians I saw leverage the power of these online video chat sites. Not only did they lean into the endless supply of spectators, but they embraced that feature of the site as the method for the trick.

Hundreds of magicians have found bursts of internet fame performing magic tricks on similar video chat sites in over a decade since Barry and Stuart shared their video. Screen recording the somewhat willing and often very young participants and sharing their reactions in clips that get viewed millions of times. Even non-magician TikTokers jumped on the trend, buying tricks to perform on Omegle.

So what is it about Omegle that was so attractive to magic?

An endless supply of participants.

The hardest part of working on TV magic shows is wrangling spectators (and sometimes the magicians).

You need good spectators who will react well to magic. They also need to want to be on camera, live locally, and sometimes fill diversity metrics. If one spectator doesn't react great, you better hope there's another one nearby you can find and convince to come over and see a trick.

With sites like Omegle, an unholy number of spectators are ready to see you perform a trick or press the skip button. Both options happen quickly; if a trick doesn't go well, you only wait a millisecond to connect to the next spectator.

And who are these people? Well, a lot of them are sex offenders (we'll get to that later in this article). But the vast majority of the people on these sites are young, bored, and reasonably willing strangers who can easily be entertained by a great magic trick. They've been chatting to equally bored strangers for ages before they got to you pestering them to name a playing card.

Magic might be a pleasant surprise.

There's this weird impromptu "what are the chances" feeling you get on platforms like these. The reactions are similar to someone on the street getting stopped by David Blaine or Dynamo – they're not expecting magic, so there's this exciting buzz to the moment overall.

Watching pranksters entertaining strangers on Omegle is exhilarating – like seeing lottery results come in or watching an American football game and trying to keep an eye out for when Taylor Swift is on screen.

You can easily draw a line from Barry and Stuart to the non-magician TikTokers posting variations of the same magic trick online today.

The setting is so controlled.

There are practical benefits to performing magic through the screen. You can easily have an accomplice handing you things from off-camera, and you don't need to worry about angles. Unlike performing magic on television, you can actually look directly at the monitor below your webcam to be sure you're performing the trick precisely how you need to.

And then there's the shot of the spectator – perfectly lined up. You don't need to cut away. Splice the shots together, and you have authentic-feeling magic content. It's relatable and has a certain "live" feeling to it.

Then there's the practicality on a non-magic level. You don't need to leave your home to create this content. You don't need a high-quality camera, a crew, or a set – it's the fast food of magic content creation.

It's a content factory.

When I work with magicians on consultancy calls, I often advise them to find their "content factory". That is, of course, if social media is something they see as crucial to their business. But you need to work out a format in which you can easily create a lot of similar content quickly. You need to feed that algorithm, baby, and the algorithm is very, very hungry.

Right now, comedians and podcasters are winning the internet. Oh, and also that cute blue toy car that drives into shops with notes and cash asking to buy things (here's the link, you're welcome).

Anyway – crowd-work comedians and podcasters are winning because they've managed to find themselves a content factory.

A comedian performs at gigs every night all week. Then, they cut up those performances into one-minute clips that all look and feel familiar.

A podcaster records for an hour or two a couple of days a week in a controlled environment with a co-host or a guest. Then, they cut those into one-minute clips that all look and feel familiar.

The internet doesn't reward good magic – we've discussed this before. Like how you no longer see those fantastic stop motion videos we used to see on YouTube – good magic takes too long to practice and film. It doesn't suit a content factory. It's why most of the magicians who are blowing up right now online – in amongst occasional good magic – are making their brothers rate an obscene number of magic tricks, or they're reacting to slow-motion magic videos, or they've given up on magic and solving an endless supply of puzzles instead.

For the longest time, online magicians also performed magic for people on Omegle. Screen recording in their homes for hours and then cutting the footage into short one-minute videos that all looked and felt familiar.

For the longest time, magic kind of had a content factory anyone could log into. One that allowed magicians to repeat the same tricks over and over again. With the spectator's reaction filling half the screen, the viewers mindlessly scroll through them not to see the trick again but to see the new reaction from a different stranger somewhere else in the world to the same snap change.

Alas, Omegle be gone.

Its founder, Leif K-Brooks, announced the decision on the site's homepage. He wrote that the website was “no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically.”

A BBC report has since said that Omegle is linked to over 50 cases involving paedophiles in the UK, US, and Australia. TikTok had already banned Omegle links due to concerns about children on TikTok being exposed to illegal behaviours on the platform.

Leif K-Brooks was only 18 when we started this site, which is insane. The site received 150,000 page views per day when it first launched. Its homepage now redirects to the founder’s statement on the closure.

Without knowing much about it, it was clear that a lot of illegal things took place on the platform, mostly populated by teens. It will be interesting to note how this impacts the TikTokers who farmed their content on the platform and to see where they flock to next

It's a strange day on the internet today.