Clubhouse is an audio chat room social media app developed by Paul Davison & Rohan Seth and launched its initial release in March 2020 and Beta version launched in May 2021. Clubhouse app is used to express our views like sharing ideas, discussing opportunities in audio mode only.
Firstly, the Clubhouse app was designed for podcasts with the name ‘TALK SHOW’. The developers rebranded it with ‘CLUB HOUSE’ and officially released it in March 2020. In the early month of the covid pandemic, it gained popularity and by Dec 2020 it holds 600,000 registered users.
Clubhouse estimated 3.5M downloads by Feb 2020 but to their surprise, it reached 8.1M downloads by Feb 15, 2021.
App Features
In the Clubhouse, there are virtual rooms where people can communicate in audio mode with each other. Based on the levels of privacy, users can join any of the 3 rooms.
They are
– Open rooms: can be joined by anyone in the Clubhouse
– Social rooms: Only users followed by moderators are allowed to join
– Closed rooms: Only with moderators invitation users can join.
Here moderators mean the users who created the room which is denoted by a green star visible next to the user’s name.
Due to the inappropriate license to operate, the Clubhouse app was banned in Oman. Not only Oman, Jordan & China banned this app in their countries. Egypt calls Clubhouse rooms a place of terrorists because of the lack of censorship and regulations associated with Clubhouse rooms.
Funding and Monetization
Initially, the Clubhouse received funding from several venture capitalists and was valued at 100 million dollars. In April 2021, Twitter proposed to buy Clubhouse at a 4 billion Valuation, and upon discussions, Clubhouse denied its acquisition.
Clubhouse in cooperation with Stripe (an Irish-American Financial Services Company) released their first monetization feature called Clubhouse payments where a group of users can send money to creators by clicking on the “send money” button and a small amount of processing fee goes to Stripe.
Alternatives
To compete with Clubhouse many companies have been creating their products some of them are
- Facebook with Hotline product (launched in April 2021)
- Twitter with Spaces product (launched in November 2020)
- Discard with Stage channels product
- Reddit with Reddit Talk product (launched in April 2021)
- Spotify with Locker room product (launched on March 30, 2021)
- Slack with their feature (haven’t launched yet)
- Telegram with Voice chats product (launched in December 2020)
