Vijaya Prasad

When it hit the market, Clubhouse erupted as the social media platform – it was exclusive, invite only, and disruptive in how it delivered content. It also came out at a time when people were stuck inside and were craving real time human interaction. I wrote about how it had potential to be a channel for real social change – a place for live interactive conversations about the things that matter.

The clubhouse blog celebrated 2021 events with a roundup highlighting significant wins including A year ago, in February 2021, the app reached a significant milestone, 10 million users – an especially impressive feat considering the app was only available on iPhones.

So one might wonder, what happened? Was it competition from the more popular and established network, Twitter? Or perhaps, simply that people went back outside. The way that information is consumed on Twitter is bite sized – just the headlines, breaking news, made for quick mobile consumption. I can count on one hand the number of times, I’ve logged into my twitter account on a desktop. And given a choice of being online scrolling from my computer vs. anywhere else, well I live in Southern California, take a wild guess!

Clubhouse had the potential to capitalize on a moment, to harness the energy of a willing audience and carve out a niche for itself in the social media space. It recently announced cross platform communications, where users could share chatrooms across platforms. But that’s like saying you could use Facebook to talk to MySpace, yes MySpace, and there’s simply no market for that.