Clubhouse's missed opportunity
The app focused on live audio at the expense of every other kind of media consumption.
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Clubhouse's missed opportunity
There was about a two-month period earlier this year when you couldn’t log onto the internet without hearing about Clubhouse. Either someone was tweeting about something that had just occurred inside a Clubhouse room, or you were encountering yet another article about why everyone was talking about Clubhouse. By courting influencers and requiring a special invite for entry, the app managed to generate a sense of FOMO that permeated outward toward the rest of the internet.
The problem with FOMO, though, is it’s difficult to sustain. Eventually, several million early adopters got into the app, tried it out, and mostly abandoned it. Over the last few months, downloads of the app have plummeted, even as it launched on Android and opened itself to all comers.
Why did it see such a drop-off? Ed Zitron published a pretty blistering critique that really captures what’s wrong with Clubhouse:
Opening the app today, it’s the same bewildering experience as before - Bitcoin psychos, LinkedIn hustle culture freaks and, ironically, a room called “Looking for Authentic and Genuine People on Clubhouse.” Another room “is the modern women over masculine or are men just SOFT ??” (punctuation theirs), and another promises to “MANIFEST Your Dream Car” from what appears to be a straight-up con artist …
… Clubhouse as a medium starts from a losing position - live anything needs to be great to attract people, and live audio is extremely difficult to do right, even with excellent production (which most Clubhouse users lack). Even with the greatest chemistry in the world, and the best production, and the best subject matter, it is a dissonant experience to enter a conversation halfway through, which “Clubhouse: Drop-in Audio” quite literally sells itself on. Drop-in audio as a product is not something that is pleasant, nor natural, nor particularly rewarding - you may chance upon a good conversation, but the likelihood for most users is that they will drop in on someone saying “well…um…so…ya know…” and drop out.
This critique really captures what I think was Clubhouse’s biggest mistake: that it focused on live audio at the expense of every other kind of media consumption.
Consider the most successful Twitch streamers; many of them will actually take their live streams, edit them, and then post them to YouTube for on-demand distribution. This way, new fans can discover their content and then gradually convert into live viewers. The Twitch-to-YouTube pipeline creates a virtuous circle that creates value for both the live and recorded video.
Clubhouse has no such virtuous circle. In its early days it outright banned recording within rooms, and today it still has no in-app recording features. Because of this, the app is under tremendous pressure to offer up fantastic live content every single time a user signs on.
Let’s imagine an alternate scenario in which Clubhouse allows for in-app playback of a room and also allows the owner of a room to download an audio file of the recording.
Under this scenario, a user who opens an app can either choose to jump right into a live conversation or start listening to it from the very beginning. Furthermore, the host can then take the recording of that room, edit it, and then distribute it as a podcast to Apple, Spotify, and all other apps. From there, a person can start listening to the podcast, become a fan, develop a sense of FOMO, and then choose to start tuning in to the live Clubhouse version so they can participate in the discussion. Such a setup would allow Clubhouse to establish that same virtuous cycle that benefits the Twitch/YouTube ecosystem.
Of course, another major app has already utilized this strategy: Spotify. The company acquired a startup called Locker Room and then launched a rebranded version of it that allows for both live participation and audio recording simultaneously. When you add Spotify’s already-existing massive user base into the mix, then you have a Clubhouse clone that Clubhouse itself might not be able to beat.
This all begs the question: was Clubhouse ever actually worth $4 billion?
Some quick hits:
This will be a cool experiment to watch: an author will serialize her novel as a Substack newsletter for $50 a year. [Newsletter Crew]
Here are some fascinating insights into the CPMs various brands pay in their programmatic advertising. [Adalytics] It also shows which media websites can command the highest CPMs.
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Mark Zuckerberg goes deep on his plans to help build the metaverse. [The Verge]
This is a fascinating profile of a podcaster who just landed a $60 million Spotify deal. [Bustle]
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