What’s Clubhouse and why you’ll be hearing more about it

Over recent days, you may have seen news about Facebook building a new product specifically designed to compete with Clubhouse.

Unlike Facebook’s previous attempts at either being inspired by (Snapchat), imitating (Zoom) or acquiring (Instagram) popular applications within its ever-expanding scope of operations, the plan to create an in-house Clubhouse clone is somewhat different, mainly because it arrives during the application’s relative infancy.

The move comes early enough to catch a lot of people unaware, leaving them wondering what exactly is the application that spurred Facebook into action.

In short, Clubhouse is an application designed around audio, building its social media network functionality around this one specific feature. Any audio broadcast on the application is contained within Clubhouse, cannot be recorded and cannot be exported. This is the fundamental premise of the application.

The first thing you see when entering the application is a collection of virtual rooms, a fancy word for groups of users essentially sharing the same group, as well as the people who have already entered them. When you decide on which room to enter, your device’s audio features will begin to work, as you will be able to listen to the audio conversation taking place.

You will naturally think that giving tens of hundreds of people the ability to speak will result in chaos. Indeed, this is why the creator of each virtual has the ability to decide which user is allowed to speak at any given time.

With no video or text, Clubhouse is akin to podcasts, only in live and impermanent form, mixed in with a little bit of Reddit, particularly in how rooms are divided under a growing number categories, themselves under three specific room types.

The types of room a user can choose from include Social rooms, where users can talk with only people they already follow and have met through the application; Closed rooms, where other users can only join through an invitation you can send them (if you are the creator); and Welcome rooms, which are also private rooms, but serve as an orientation room of sorts.

Each room has two sections, the stage and the audience. Upon entering a room, you will be automatically placed in the audience section. Users can then raise their hand through the respective feature to request to be placed in the stage section, where their microphone will become unmuted and they will have the ability to speak.

The rise of Clubhouse has been so sharp that you can go back a mere nine months to observe how few people outside the startup ecosystem and its business-centric news cycle will have likely heard of it. Towards the end of May of 2020, Clubhouse began picking momentum, both in Silicon Valley and in the press.

Back then, Clubhouse had a mere 1,500 registered users while being valued at $100 million, a valuation that had been reached following a mooted $12 million investment by private venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. During that month, Clubhouse hosted a conversation in one of its rooms with a number of famous people, including rapper and entrepreneur MC Hammer, journalist and political commentator Van Jones, writer Shaka Senghor, as well as the two founders of the aforementioned Andreessen Horowitz.

At the time, all of Clubhouse’s users were either public personalities invited to provide some sort of worth to the application, particularly in terms of content, technology investors and other people adjacent to Silicon Valley.

One of the aspects which appealed at the time was Clubhouse’s ability to engage users without demanding the entirety of their attention.

“Almost all social media requires us to look at a screen. This is the first one where I’m not looking at a screen. I’m involved in social media but I’m sitting by the pool with my kids and as long as I’m muted and not speaking, it’s great,” said Bilal Zuberi, a partner at Lux Capital at the time.

Still, even with the application gaining more attention at the time was not enough to fully convince people of the success it would soon enjoy.

“It’s either dead by July or it’s something big. We’re all locked away right now so it was a good time to launch it. I don’t know if it’s sustainable,” said venture firm Freestyle’s co-founder Josh Felser, touching on a crucial point regarding Clubhouse, the timing of its launch.

Fast forward to the present and Clubhouse has reached approximately 600,000 users, attracting the participation and promotion of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and musician Drake. Earlier this month, a combination of events prompted a massive spike in people interested in joining Clubhouse.

The GameStop, AMC and Nokia trading fiasco involving trading application Robinhood, created such a frenzy that Elon Musk hosted a conversation between himself and Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Clubhouse to discuss the entire affair.

Such was the interest to the invitation-only Clubhouse that, in China, invitations were being sold on Idle Fish, Alibaba’s second-hand market, despite the fact that Clubhouse isn’t yet available in the Chinese version of Apple’s app store and with no Android version of Clubhouse having been released as of yet.

However, that interaction also resulted in some criticism being flung towards Clubhouse. The reason for this was the type of room Musk and Tenev were having their conversation in. The Closed room prohibited a number of journalists and other people who had an interest in the conversation and who would have to wait for the full transcript of the conversation to be leaked later during that day for them to be able to see what had been said.

Returning back to its imminent competition and now valued at $1 billion while becoming popular outside of the United States, particularly in Europe and Japan, Clubhouse is now set to be tested by tech goliath Facebook.

“Facebook executives have ordered employees to create a similar product, said the people, who were not authorised to speak publicly,” the New York Times wrote in a recent piece. It remains to be seen whether this will truly sway the people currently flocking to Clubhouse, particularly with Facebook tarnishing other products, including popular messenger application WhatsApp, with its data privacy and data protection concerns.