Is this Clubhouse’s final form? Over the last weeks, the departure of the platform’s several top executives has begun raising brows about its future – will there even be one? Meanwhile, downloads haven’t been looking good as well, spelling trouble for the once buzzed-about social app.
“In late April, Stephanie Simon left as the company’s head of Brand Evangelism and Development. Simon joined Clubhouse just a couple of months after launch in 2020. Then this week, three more leaders announced their resignations, including Nina Gregory, Aarthi Ramamurthy, and Anu Atluru; the trio led News, International, and Community, respectively.”
In The Club or Out of It?
The gradual migration of its content leaders points to a change in Clubhouse’s strategy, with Bloomberg also reporting that the app is making significant staffing changes as part of a ‘broader restructuring and rethinking of the app’s audio strategy.’ late last week. This ‘strategic shift’, as noted by Platformer’s Casey Newton, is likely more aligned with less structured and more casual use of the app for catching up with friends and like-minded people, or ‘chilling’ online within shared audio spaces. In short, they’re trying to turn it into Messenger, but with audio instead of text for communication and interaction.
That makes sense for achieving more casual usage but also aligns with the prediction of Blab founder Shaan Puri as to Clubhouse’s likely trajectory. Puri, whose lengthy Tweet thread spoke about what he foresaw for Clubhouse, also predicts the app’s downward spiral, with chilling likely being a ‘Dead End’ too. Puri would know as he has worked on several buzzy apps that saw great performance early on, only to fade out after some time. The reason? Live content, in itself, is hard, no matter how good you are. This is the reason why Blab died out, along with Meerkat, and why live-stream elements on Facebook and Twitter fail to live up to the hype. So much for being ‘game-changers’, eh?
Protocol’s report states that between January and March of 2022, Clubhouse has seen 3.8 million downloads, compared to 19 million downloads during the same period last year – an 80% YoY decline. At one point, it was the talk of the town, now, you barely hear any mention of it. While the app did start seeing growth outside of the US market, in India, even that has begun to go down, which could mark the last stage for Clubhouse.
The Wrap
Can Clubhouse forge ahead and prove that it’s worthy of retaining a spot in the pantheon of social networks? Or will it suffer the same fate as some of its predecessors? Snapchat was able to do it; then again, unlike Snap, Clubhouse really only has its audio rooms. Unless Clubhouse undergoes a major overhaul and shifts its focus, it might not see a new dawn. This might be ending things on a sour note, but sometimes you just have to lay down the facts. With video consumption and appeal continuously rising, it’s hard to defend choosing an audio format over short-form videos.
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