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Clubhouse has had an amazing year in one of us most of us would rather forget. Live audio application launched during pandemic; won over 10 million downloads for an iOS invite-only app; and has succeeded to the point that almost all social platforms want to copy it. Congratulations to the Clubhouse.
However, the company is now facing its greatest challenges. On the one hand, the pandemic is on the wane, and people might be more interested in actual socializing than in conversations facilitated by their phones. Anyone who advertises their court as the Clubhouse’s next big contender is right. But for the people who to do end up wanting to talk to each other online, they will soon have many more places to do so. In case you haven’t been following: Twitter, Facebook (apparently), LinkedIn, Discord, Spotify, Mark Cuban, and Slack have all started or are working on their own social audio attempts – the space is on to get busy.
The great concern of Clubhouse is that, as I postulated in February, social audio could follow the same trajectory as Snapchat’s Stories feature: a brilliant social media modification idea that continues to live on in all apps to the detriment of the upstart who launched the format. And social audio is going down that path. With the threat growing, it’s worth looking at where Clubhouse is most likely to run into trouble.
But first: what does Clubhouse have to offer? It was the first social audio, and it is something. Already, it has millions of users who come to the Clubhouse purely for social audio content, and that includes headline-grabbing names like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and other celebrities. Tech CEOs are even making announcements in Clubhouse, including Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, who advertised his company’s copier product in the app. The app generates news and discussions – it’s something much harder for other businesses to clone.
People have also built habits around the Clubhouse, which is a positive sign for user retention. The team also plans to launch a creator program soon that will reward its most dedicated users with revenue and resources to bolster their shows.
And most importantly, the app has been boosted over the past month. The company recently kicked Fadia Kader from Instagram to lead its media partnerships and creators. At Instagram, she worked with musicians to help them optimize their work on the platform. Presumably, she will do something similar at the Clubhouse. Already, I saw her in a room with Justin Bieber talking about her latest album. Clubhouse has also hired Maya Watson from Netflix to become its head of global marketing, meaning he will soon be devoting resources to promoting Clubhouse rather than relying primarily on word of mouth. These are all important steps in keeping the Clubhouse interesting and successful.
But the app now faces competition from some of the biggest platforms in the world, which already have years of experience in moderation, are available on iOS and Android, and have massive and loyal user bases. who they can push the social audio. Some companies, like Twitter and Discord, have already offered live social audio features to their millions of users with the same interface as Clubhouse. Anyone who hasn’t been invited to Clubhouse or an iPhone can now access the magic of social audio without any association with Clubhouse.
The most dangerous possibility for Clubhouse, however, is how easily it could lose the big names on its platform to challengers. Spotify, which this week announced the acquisition of Betty Labs, the creator of the sports-focused social audio app Locker Room, plans to bring the app to Android, change its name and expand its coverage to music, culture and sports. He could compete directly with Clubhouse for talent. Joe Rogan, for example, recently joined a Clubhouse chat, and while Spotify’s R&D manager tells me the company won’t stop its podcasters from using other social audio apps, it’s easy to imagine that the company encourages the use of its own. Musicians like Bieber, who may have come to the Clubhouse to debut, could turn to the Spotify app instead to nurture relationships with the streaming giant. For reference, when Kylie Jenner tweeted that she had barely opened Snapchat, the company’s stock lost $ 1.3 billion. If stars like Tiffany Haddish decide to spend their time elsewhere, Clubhouse will also falter.
At the same time, a few of these competitors are specifically interested in creating a native recording in their app, possibly to fuel the podcasting ecosystem and on-demand listening. Clubhouse has not yet done this. Fireside, co-founded by Mark Cuban, allows users to capture sound effects, such as music, and record their shows for distribution on podcasting platforms, as well as for later playback on the app itself. even. Spotify will likely do the same with its app and rely on its Anchor software to handle hosting and distribution. Twitter’s head of consumer products said The edge that this too would allow people to natively register their spaces. Clubhouse did not build this feature, limiting its users to live chats, which can be difficult to follow if they join them halfway through. The collapse of the context will challenge any live-oriented platform, but some of Clubhouse’s competitors are already working to fix this.
The stories made Snapchat a success. He pioneered the idea of ephemeral content and brought a semblance of authenticity back to social media. But it didn’t take long for the feature to reach the same competitors Clubhouse now faces. To run its business, Snapchat doubled down on its Android app, made it more accessible to new users through a redesign, and aggressively pursued content partnerships with media and entertainment companies. It now pays users to create content for its competitor TikTok Spotlight and supports a growing advertising business, but Instagram has finally won the crown of stories. Clubhouse has yet to pursue any announcements or memberships, but that will be the next step in making it a standalone platform. (Notably, however, its competitors, like Facebook, already govern ad targeting, which perhaps makes Clubhouse’s job of selling ads or accessing the platform itself more difficult.)
None of this is to say that Clubhouse will not survive or build a strong business in the months and years to come. He just needs to stay in the conversation.
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