To the birth of the Clubhouse social network in March 2020, a simple concept: why tweet text when we could talk to each other? Result, in February 2021, Clubhouse counts 10 million users daily.
As its name suggests, the social network has the effect of very closed club influencers, journalists, startupers and celebrities. Available in Europe since February 2021, it is, for the time being, reserved for Apple users despite the promise of its creators to open soon to Android. To join the Clubhouse community, you must also be invited.
According to the magazine The Cut, once the application is installed, users are offered to join “rooms”, virtual rooms in which people share a voice conversation or in which one or more hosts give a sort of conference without any video or image and very little text. It looks like a podcast but is played live without the possibility of replaying.
The “room” facilitators are often big names in their field and offer to tackle a specific theme in each conversation. Like a little impression of a counter-evening in a kitchen that you can join and that you absolutely must not leave on pain of missing the latest gossip. Except that in these rooms, you can meet Drake, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk or Kevin Hart. And these celebrities would feel more free to speak since they know that the conversation will remain “private” and unregistered, can we read in NBC News.
Twitter and Facebook charged
The attractiveness of this social network allows it to be valued today to the tune of one billion dollars (830 million euros) according to the sources of the journalist from NBC, Dylan Byers.
The sound being precisely what could be lacking in social networks fed by photos, videos and texts, Twitter was quick to rectify the situation by creating Spaces which works on the same principle as Clubhouse while Facebook is testing a similar product. Spotify is also reportedly in the testing phase to offer live and paid podcast events.
Will live audio formats – some call radio – succeed in outperforming the podcast market? Difficult to know according to Dylan Byers but what is certain is that this type of social network has a bright future ahead of it, in particular because it offers “new services: the possibility of speaking publicly and for free, the possibility of distributing this conversation free of charge to a network of Internet users and the possibility for the audience to respond with the permission of the host.»
For the moment, Clubhouse is holding up rather well to the competition because it is not necessary to go through Facebook, Twitter or any social network to become a member. But it might be hard to hold on knowing that Twitter has twenty times more daily users and Facebook 180 times more. The two networks, whose services cloned from other applications are not always successful, hope to make a difference.
There are still many challenges for Clubhouse to overcome in order to win: improving its algorithm, moderation, security, etc.
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