As it works to redefine its identity and recapture its growth momentum, Clubhouse recently announced that it’s launching a new and more private approach to audio social meet-ups. Through what it calls ‘Houses’, Clubhouse is introducing more enclosed, invite-only spaces within the app.

As Clubhouse explains:

“Think of Houses as private hallways just for your favorite people. You can drop in anytime, hop from room to room, catch up with friends, and meet their friends. Houses usually have regular meetup times, and everyone gets to nominate a few friends, so the House grows through people you trust. Or, you can keep it closed if you like – it’s fun either way!”

Back to the Roots 

The process essentially provides more control for users to curate the clubhouse experience that they prefer, with the people they want to hear from, as opposed to wading through irrelevant rooms and sessions. As with all live-streaming platforms, discovery remains a key challenge. When everybody is given the chance to broadcast, a lot of these sessions will end up being crappy. It takes skill and experience to create consistent and engaging content that will keep audiences entertained.

Most people can’t do this, which, in turn, results in a worse user experience because you can end up being confronted by a range of utterly rubbish broadcasts every time you open the app. At that point, it’d be better to call it a dumpsite, rather than a clubhouse. Clubhouse Co-founder Paul Davison even admitted that Clubhouse made an ‘oopsie’ on this front. Davison tried putting a more positive spin on it, but as we’ve seen on other streaming platforms – the best streamers do great and can drive huge value, but 90% of the broadcasts are not, and this difference makes it quite difficult to build a truly engaging scalable experience that’ll keep people coming back.

This is what this new initiative is focused on. With Houses, users will be able to be more selective about the content they’re shown in the app, ideally limiting poor experiences. Although there will still be a level of discovery with this new approach. House member lists will be publicly accessible. Users can also still explore the hallways and discover new people, but the actual House rooms themselves will be private. So, you can essentially still look up potentially valuable experiences, just not join them, unless you apply or get in contact with organizers some other way.

The Wrap

What’s currently going on with Clubhouse is similar to what we saw before on Facebook, where engagement gradually shifted away from the News Feeds and into Groups. Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri also said that engagement is now shifting into DMs. At least in this sense, Clubhouse’s approach could align with broader behaviors in other apps.

Ideally, Clubhouse would be able to curate the best experiences for each user, maximizing the listenership for each broadcast. This option might effectively boost engagement among existing users, but whether it’ll make Clubhouse more exciting for others remains to be seen. Regardless, Clubhouse needs to try something.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3Qqt41g