Can the Clubhouse Craze Outlast the Pandemic?
The startup’s opportunity is not conference calls, it’s never-ending drive-time radio
Remember when the back of everyone’s toilet had a pile of magazines on it?Those magazine piles vanished with the advent of the mobile internet. Today, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are never-ending sources of content you can tune into in those spare moments, to occupy that part of your brain. Clubhouse — the new darling of Silicon Valley and the extremely online set — may have hit upon a rich vein of similar desperation, and if the company navigates it correctly, could become just as essential.
Stratechery’s Ben Thompson wrote about Clubhouse’s opportunity last week. Economics of podcasts and blogging aside, his most important product insight is this one about the role of serendipitous discovery:
The key for Clubhouse will be in honing its algorithms so that every time a listener opens the app they are presented with a conversation that is interesting to them. This is the other area where podcasts miss the mark: it is amazing to have so much choice, but all too often that choice is paralyzing; sometimes — a lot of times! — users just want to scroll their Twitter feed instead of reading a long blog post, or click through Stories or swipe TikToks, and Clubhouse is poised to…
