Clubhouse is breaking up to stay relevant - The Verge
Clubhouse will reorganize around smaller houses to split up the large social network. Plus, PRX Productions and Goat Rodeo partner, and Panera adds a sonic brand.
Hello again everyone — it’s been a while! Ariel’s on vacation for the next week-plus, which means I get to tap in again and do my best impression of your usual host. Today, I chat about Clubhouse’s big revamp, Panera adding a branded sound, and PRX Productions boosting its output through a new partnership.
Clubhouse splits up
On Monday, I opened up Clubhouse to see if I could find any rooms worth tuning into. Right up top, the app suggested a room called “ Tech News around the World,” which seemed relevant enough to me, a technology reporter. But after that, things broke down right away. “Quick tip for getting more SAVES on your Pinterest pins!” didn’t seem to be playing well with anyone. (It had only 17 listeners.) “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY FAVORITE NEPHEW RAYMO ,” was surprisingly vibrant when I popped in but seemed to be poorly targeted to me, a person who does not know Raymo.
Clubhouse, it almost goes without saying, has experienced a major drop-off in interest since its heights during the coronavirus-induced lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Downloads of the app have fallen 86 percent this year, the analytics firm Sensor Tower tells Hot Pod. The firm says Clubhouse was downloaded 4.2 million times between January and July of 2022, down from 29.4 million downloads during the same period in 2021. At the same time, Twitter Spaces — anecdotally, at least — has been eating Clubhouse’s lunch. I won’t argue that Twitter’s recommendations are that much better (they’re not!), but the company was able to swiftly rebuild Clubhouse’s core features inside its existing social network, siphoning off a lot of the app’s momentum.
It’s been clear for a while that Clubhouse needed to make some big changes to regain that early buzz — and now, the company is detailing how it plans to evolve. Last week, Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison laid out what the next era of Clubhouse will look like: instead of one open network containing a countless series of rooms you can pop into, the app will ask people to organize into groups (“houses”), and audio rooms will exist inside those groups that are only accessible to members. Each house can have “its own personality, culture and content moderation rules,” Davison wrote on Twitter.
Rating: 5