What’s The Buzz Around Clubhouse?

With the world turned upside-down due to the pandemic, people have significantly increased their social media consumption over the past year. We have seen many new social media platforms and features emerging in the past year, but there is one specific social media platform that has particularly grabbed our attention. 

There’s been a lot of buzz about Clubhouse over the last year, leaving some people to wonder what all the fuss is about. While new apps tend to often come and go, Clubhouse has managed to stand out as one of the most unique app releases in recent memory. For many, when it comes to social networking apps, most people think of only Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They enjoy the ease of creating content in text and photo/video formats and love the attention they get from other users in the form of likes, comments and shares. And it’s needless to say the endless scrollable content users get for themselves on these apps. It’s a design that works well for the apps mentioned above, but that’s not to say it’s the only way a social media platform can operate.

Clubhouse has been around since March 2020, when it was launched by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth. By May 2020, it already had 1,500 users and was worth $100m. The main reason Clubhouse has been such a hit is its fresh format and invitation only platform. Its curated live audio recreates an on-stage and event-like talk experience in a social media setting. Clubhouse is a social networking app in its most basic sense, but the way people interact is considerably different. After opening the Clubhouse app, users are presented with a list of virtual rooms to join. Each room features a small group of speakers talking about any topic imaginable. In contrast, the rest of the users are audience members that sit back and listen to the conversation at hand. The entire experience is audio-only, with users able to switch between rooms whenever they’d like, request to speak in one of these rooms, or create their own room for others to join. Users aren’t given the option to turn on their cameras or to stream video or use text to say something. As noted in a blog post, the company says,