What’s in this article:
- The growth of Clubhouse has been very impressive. Here’s what marketers can learn from it
The expansion beyond the limits of invitations was announced in a blog post entitled Opening Day posted on July 21, 2021. The audio app founders, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth explain in that blog what they envisioned and why it makes sense to drop the restriction:
Conversation is what makes us human, and so much good happens when people come together to talk, but when life is busy, real connection can be hard to find. We wanted there to be more of that in the world.
So, they allowed themselves a year of beta to test it out and were pleased with the results. As we saw in Why Marketers Are Jumping on Audio Platforms, audio platforms in general and Clubhouse in particular really took over the past year.
They explained that it was necessary to limit participation via invites to keep control as it scaled up: “By adding people in waves, welcoming new faces each week in our Wednesday Orientations, and talking with the community each Sunday in Town Hall, we’ve been able to grow Clubhouse in a measured way, and (mostly 😬) keep things from breaking as we’ve scaled.”
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However, that was always intended to be only a temporary measure, as the goal was to make “access to meaningful conversations” open to anyone. “And the best rooms on Clubhouse are the ones where you meet people from far outside your social circle, with very different views and lived experiences, who change your perspective on the world.”
Now the app is fully open, which the blog post explains, “means we have removed our waitlist system so that anyone can join” on iOS or Android. Any club link can be shared anywhere, and any public event is truly open to all.
Even before this open access, the growth of Clubhouse has been very impressive. As related in the blog:
Our team has gone from 8 people to 58. The number of daily rooms has grown from 50k to half a million. We’ve added 10M people to the community since we launched Android in mid-May and seen 90M DMs sent since we launched Backchannel last week. The average listener now spends over an hour a day on Clubhouse, and a huge percentage of people don’t just listen but actually talk. It’s a great way to grow through existing clients and contribute to its overall success and bottom line.
The active participation is what the founders consider their “favorite part of the whole thing,” but the large number of listeners may be what truly catches the ear of marketers and what opens up new monetization opportunities built on popularity and expansive reach, as we’ve seen for TikTok.