Time.news – There was a moment when the Clubhouse looked like the new agora. It seems like a lifetime ago, it was the day before yesterday. In the midst of the pandemic, the app that allows you to organize live audio events explodes. In June 2021 reaches its global peak, with 17 million monthly active users.
In those days, he cashed in an investment round that brought total funding to 110 million dollars and the company’s valuation to 4 billion. Then the collapse and, today, something approaching irrelevance.
Users and downloads: the meltdown
According to data provided to Time.news by SensorTower analyst Abe Yousef, Last year, app installs dropped by 83% globally and even 95% in Italy compared to 2021.
Compared to the peak, monthly active users last December decreased by 83% on a global scale and by 85% in our country, where in any case the audience has always been disproportionate to visibility. Everyone talked about it, but very few attended the Clubhouse. According to the Privacy Guarantor, in 2021 the social network had around 90,000 users in Italy.
What does the Guarantor have to do with it? Last December he fined the app 2 million euros for “many violations”: “Lack of transparency on the use of data by users and their ‘friends’; ability for users to store and share audio without the consent of registered people; profiling and sharing of account information without the identification of a correct legal basis; indefinite storage times for the recordings made by the social network to counter any abuses”.
Less fundamentalism to save themselves
Clubhouse has tried and is trying to escape irrelevance. Even at the cost of abandoning audio-integralism. It introduced chats, to “allow users to communicate with each other during a live broadcast” and give organizers the ability to “get real-time feedback”. Last year also launched Wavea function to organize events more quickly and, above all, Houses, a sort of app within an app that allows anyone to create private communities, with their own rules.
It is a clear departure from the initial idea: from a “club” in a single “house” to many different “houses”. From open space (albeit by invitation) based on a theme of common interest to closed spaces based on personal knowledge. In June, Bloomberg reported “layoffs” due to a “change in strategy.”
What went wrong
Clubhouse success it evaporated as quickly as it arrived. The launch of the chats and of Houses confirms the attempt to free oneself from audio fundamentalism and from an overly elitist access mechanism. The delays have weighed: the app has long been available only for iOS, that is, only for those who had an iPhone.
The Android version (i.e. for the most popular operating system in the world) arrived only in May 2021 and the web version only in January 2022, when the drive had long since run out. Without forgetting the lack of clarity on how and how much content creators can monetize.
As Clubhouse co-founder and CEO Paul Davison admitted in an October 2021 Bloomberg interview, the company — which had just eight employees at the time of the boom — wasn’t ready to handle such rapid growth. Understandable. In the same interview, however, Davison reveals a reading that, today, sounds like a condemnation: “When a new medium emerges, the company that focuses on that medium ends up being its leader. For texts it was Twitter, for photos it was Instagram, for videos Youtube. I think social audio will be the same.”
The world of social media, however, is profoundly different from that of the beginning of Youtube (2005), Twitter (2006) and Instagram (2010). Today it is no longer enough to be first to be first. Given the success of Clubhouse, virtually every platform has built a similar feature, from Twitter Spaces to Facebook Live Audio Rooms to LinkedIn to Spotify Live. “The broad competition crushed the app,” confirms Abe Yousef.
A competition that actually is a practice capable of suffocating niches before they become a problem. It happens like this: a good idea is absorbed by platforms for which it is just one feature among many, which make it available to a much wider audience, draining the “arrived first” app. For the big names it is a small bet with enormous potential. For the little ones it’s the end. It’s a bit like what happened to Snapchat, the app that invented timed content. Its decline (which however arrived after reaching financial and popularity levels incomparable with those of Clubhouse) began when Mark Zuckerberg decided to copy the format verbatim, bringing the Stories to Facebook and Instagram.
Was social audio just a bubble?
Beyond delays and competition, there’s always the usual problem of over-enthusiasm. It doesn’t take much, very little, to talk about a revolutionary app, the future of social networks and the “next TikTok”. At the moment, the Clubhouse parable more reminiscent of Periscope. The platform that allowed anyone to broadcast live video seemed to have to undermine the traditional way of telling and showing the world. Acquired by Twitter in 2015, it soon disappeared from the radar, only to be closed in 2021.
However, it is worth wondering if Clubhouse is the finger or the Moon. Is it the story of an app that has not lived up to (astronomical) expectations or is it social audio that has been a bubble? Yes, because – unlike evanescent Snapchat-style content, which has established itself almost everywhere – it wasn’t just Clubhouse that remained a niche: none of its counterparts made it big. Perhaps the time is not right. Or maybe live audio is meant to be gregarious: one feature among others, but not the center of an entire platform.