Is the rise of Clubhouse really that surprising?
Clubhouse has raised fresh funds in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, a US venture capital firm. While the company didn’t disclose any specific details on the investment size or the valuation.
While Clubhouse continues being the hottest consumer app recently not just in Silicon Valley but also in Asia, including Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and Taiwan, along with the popularity of “Podcast”, it seems like the world is heading back to the good old days when the radio is a major part of people’s daily life. However, if you take a deeper look, Clubhouse or Podcast did not just bring back the audio market but more importantly revolutionized it.
Most of the content formats, such as text, image, and video, have been through a dramatic development in the past decades. And as you observe, we can always see a pattern, and the pattern is how Clubhouse becomes what it is right now. We can break the process into three major phases for all these content formats.
The first phase is simply how they deliver originally, such as TV, Newspaper, Photos, and Radio, countering to video, text, image, and audio. And then moving forward to Phase 2 how Youtube, Newsletter, and Podcast replace the above format, by digitalizing the content and also wave off the limitation of time and space. People are able to consume the content wherever and whenever they want. Entering Phase 3, which is the current era, all the delivery needs some sort of social networking element involved, live-streaming on multiple platforms, sharing photos on Instagram, writing stuff on Twitter and Facebook. And yet Podcast has never integrated the social networking feature not until we saw the rise of Clubhouse that it managed to make it happen.
Then what’s next?
It’s not hard to foresee the future, Rohan Seth, founder of Clubhouse, has also provided us with some preview during his latest announcement on the future plan. More than likely we can refer to the live-streaming industry, the features of the donation system, VIP room and ticket selling, ways of Clubhouse to merchandise the platform. But they might also impact another industry, which is the virtual event platform. During the pandemic, a few of the virtual event companies were booming helping people to arrange online courses, fireside chat, lectures, or even panel discussion. However, with Clubhouse, people are easier to throw those events in a more convenient way and less time costing. So, whether or not Clubhouse will gear toward that direction will extremely influence the dynamic of the market.
All in all, I believe that this will only be the starting point for audio service to grow, we can expect there’ll be more related products, audio plus social networking, coming out in the future. Just imagine an audio version of Instagram that people will only share their voice as a post or even an audio-only story feature.
