Happy Birthday Clubhouse
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps #79 - Just Like a Game of Quidditch!. Check out the full article for more insights.
Audio-first social network Clubhouse celebrated its first birthday last week. What a ride it's been for the new concept that went viral for a hot minute and raised more money than makes sense.
If you've been following Clubhouse's journey, on this newsletter you probably know of its ups and downs. If not, you can see from the chart above that things aren't looking all that great now that the platform is a year old and looks and feels pretty much the same as when it started...
So, what went wrong? Everything and nothing all at the same time! The concept of audio-only social media is novel but also strange. Most people I know would prefer writing to talking to random strangers. Throw different languages, not being available on Android, and invite-only access, and what you're doing is more of an experiment than a company.
That's what happened for the first few months. Clubhouse garnered 818K downloads in 2020, most of which came in December as the experiment started to go viral. Downloads ballooned in February, giving the team the excitement it needs to raise way too much money while not really improving the platform.
That peak died off very quickly, and with it, the excitement about the app that was still not available for Android devices. At the same time, incumbent social media platforms started teasing their own versions of audio-only communications.
Twitter released Spaces in May, around the same time Clubhouse finally landed on Android, followed by Greenroom from Spotify. The green giant didn't even get close, adding a meager 143K users, according to our intelligence.
If you remember the days of early Twitter, where influencers were starting to grow, this is pretty much it but with a more massive audience, which is why Clubhouse managed to get traction to begin with. I think most users aren't interested in speaking but rather listening, making Clubhouse more of a live radio show than a communication platform.
It's not unlike what we see on Twitter now and Instagram, but much more extreme since speaking requires more effort than writing or snapping pictures. In a way, Clubhouse isn't even competing with Twitter or those other social media platforms but rather YouTube.
But that's also the only way it could succeed if there's a future for it. YouTube rewards creators for their content with ad revenue, something most other platforms don't. Twitch and TikTok let users pay creators, which is nice but not the same. Twitter's new Super Follows let users subscribe to creators, which is even less good.
With a user-base totaling 27.3M worldwide, Clubhouse isn't necessarily a winner but also not a total loser. If they follow the YouTube model and just reward creators automatically, they have a chance.
They'd have to build a successful ad platform first, but that's a whole other thing...
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
