The GiD Report#147 — Clubhouse is the end of a chapter, not the beginning of a new one

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GlobaliD

5 min readFeb 17, 2021

Welcome to The GiD Report, a weekly newsletter that covers GlobaliD team and partner news, market perspectives, and industry analysis. You can check out last week’s report here.

This week:

The Clubhouse story
One Clubhouse challenge
Telegram’s monetization story (or lack thereof)
States take on tech reg mantle
Big Tech gets bigger
It’s not about your identity, it’s what you can do with it (live performance edition)
Stuff happens

1. Clubhouse is the end of a chapter, not the beginning of a new one.

Clubhouse is the belle of the ball right now. This is a pandemic story. This is a content creation story. And sure, COVID was a clear catalyst, but it was probably only a matter of time audio joined text and video in reaching this logical destination.

Facebook, Twitter, Mark Cuban, and I’m sure countless others have already gotten the memo.

As Ben Thompson notes, Clubhouse was “inevitable”:

Clubhouse, meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s hottest consumer startup, feels like the opposite case: in retrospect its emergence feels like it was inevitable — if anything, the question is what took so long for audio to follow the same path as text, images, and video.

Also:

The most obvious difference between Clubhouse and podcasts is how much dramatically easier it is to both create a conversation and to listen to one. This step change is very much inline with the shift from blogging to Twitter, from website publishing to Instagram, or from YouTube to TikTok.
Secondly, like those successful networks, Clubhouse centralizes creation and consumption into a tight feedback loop. In fact, conversation consumers can, by raising their hand and being recognized by the moderator, become creators in a matter of seconds.

In other words, it’s not that Clubhouse ushers in a new chapter of anything — well, aside from the democratization, which itself is arguably a game changer. Rather, it represents the natural conclusion of the last cycle, in part due to audio’s stunted evolution during the period, now supercharged in a locked down world.

One telling fact:

This is a well-worn story, but one story it isn’t? It’s not yet a monetization story. It’s unclear how you seamlessly insert algorithmic ads into real-life conversations.

According to Ben, tipping is a potential path forward that’s been discussed, a path Twitter is looking to also take.

And so the rapid ascent Clubhouse has enjoyed is easy to understand, but it will run into similar challenges — perhaps greater — than all the other analogs from this past cycle.

All of which speaks to the need of Trusted Engagement.

That’s the story here, and like the pitter patter on Clubhouse, that story is being told in real-time.

Stay tuned.

Relevant:

2. A reminder of Clubhouse’s old chapter challenges:

Stanford:

The Stanford Internet Observatory has confirmed that Agora, a Shanghai-based provider of real-time engagement software, supplies back-end infrastructure to the Clubhouse App. This relationship had previously been widely suspected but not publicly confirmed. Further, SIO has determined that a user’s unique Clubhouse ID number and chatroom ID are transmitted in plaintext, and Agora would likely have access to users’ raw audio, potentially providing access to the Chinese government. In at least one instance, SIO observed room metadata being relayed to servers we believe to be hosted in the PRC, and audio to servers managed by Chinese entities and distributed around the world via Anycast. It is also likely possible to connect Clubhouse IDs with user profiles.

3. In search of a monetization story, Telegram edition:

Via /andrey:

4. This week in Big Tech:

States are now leapfrogging feds when it comes to tech regulation. Axios:

A new bill out of North Dakota would force Apple to let developers go around the App Store to deliver iPhone apps directly to consumers. It would also block Apple from making developers use its payment system for in-app purchases and subscriptions.
In Virginia, a digital privacy bill that’s supported by some tech trade groups and companies like IBM is set to pass and be signed into law. It would make Virginia the second state to pass a major data privacy bill, after California’s 2018 law.