The rapid swelling of user numbers in February may have simply inflated numbers for that month and into early March before settling back to a more sustainable level. This may be a natural cycle as new people try out the app, and only some stick around. That led to noticeably smaller room sizes in April. Many of the new users in February haven’t shown the same type of retention and use frequency as the December and January cohorts. Reddit is in beta with a group of subreddit moderators, and Discord is becoming increasingly popular for Clubhouse-style rooms using its Stages feature.Ĭlubhouse’s current challenge is less about downloads than the new competition and one other growing problem in lower user frequency of use. We also expect to soon see an update to Spotify’s Locker Room with new branding at Green Room. Twitter Spaces has been growing in popularity. Granted, there is now much more competition. The introduction of the Android App should bring those numbers back up again. That makes for a pretty clean bell curve for December to April. That was followed by just 900,000 in April. Sensor Tower reported last month that Clubhouse downloads peaked at 9.6 million in February and then fell to just 2.7 million in March. However, the growth rate declined as quickly as it arrived. That dramatic growth contributed to Clubhouse closing new funding at a $4 billion valuation in April, a sharp increase over its $1 billion valuation three months earlier. This was driven by a loosening of the tight controls over invites for new users and quick expansion into several countries in Europe and Asia. That figure shot up to over two million monthly active users (MAU) just a few weeks later and over 10 million MAUs in February. It entered the year with just about 1 million total users. The pioneering social audio app has experienced rapid growth in 2021. The Rise and Fall, and Maybe Rise in Popularity If you are in the voice AI or chatbot industry, have an Android smartphone and would like an invite, you should be able to use this link to skip the waiting line and RSVP for our next event on Monday. We have published a number of those events as podcasts primarily so Android users could get access to the insights provided by the guests even though they were shut out of joining the virtual rooms live and asking questions or adding their comments to the discussions. It has been disappointing, for example, that so many of the great discussions we have had in the Conversational AI Club have been limited to iOS users thus far. That constraint is now out of the way and should make Clubhouse much more suitable for many types of conversations. The iOS exclusivity certainly constrained growth even as many longtime Android users picked up iPhones and iPads just to get Clubhouse access. Nearly every other social audio app has included many of Clubhouse’s user interface design elements. The app may not have invented what we now know as social audio, but it has popularized the segment among early tech adopters and is responsible for much of the current design trends. People who have recently left Clubhouse estimated that the company’s cash has given it enough runway to stave off existential questions for several years.Clubhouse received a needed boost today as it opened up to Android smartphone users for the first time. Clubhouse has under 100 employees and, at least so far, has avoided the kind of deep layoffs some companies have had to resort to recently-like Peloton, which cut 2,800 employees, or 20% of its corporate workforce, earlier this year. It raised boatloads of cash-around $310 million, according to PitchBook-and, more important, it doesn’t seem to have blown the money on the kind of extravagant spending spree that landed so many other tech startups in hot water. Even the luminaries from Andreessen Horowitz-the venture firm that backed Clubhouse and then flooded its chatrooms with its partners to expound on crypto and other topics-have become far less active personalities on the app.īut Clubhouse is still alive and kicking. By some estimates, usage of the app is down more than 70% from its peak in February 2021, and popular creators who once hosted lively interactive discussions on the platform are bailing on it. Sure, the social audio app’s star has dimmed since it became a Silicon Valley sensation during the first phase of the pandemic, when millions of people were stuck at home, bored out of their minds. Maybe the eulogies for Clubhouse were a bit premature.
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