The big thing
Clubhouse’s growth is slowing
In a tweet this week, tech journo Casey Newton highlighted that SensorTower, a generally trustworthy app analytics firm, had reported a big drop in month-over-month Clubhouse downloads, 73% to be exact. Now, 2.6 million monthly installs isn’t bad for a consumer app, but it’s also not the hockey stick growth investors want when your previous month saw 9.6 million downloads. With a billion-dollar valuation under its belt, rocket ship growth is a must.
Clubhouse is just another app, but it has been a hot topic over the last year in Silicon Valley circles, largely because we’ve seemed to go several years without a social media startup getting quite this hot quite this fast. Part of that has been the frothiness of venture dollars as of late, but a bigger part has been the excitement around audio opportunities highlighting a clear gap in the social market.
Well, as quickly as it’s been highlighted, it has been studied and the copycats are about to start flying.
Twitter has long been publicly testing its Clubhouse competitor — Twitter Spaces — but who else is looking at this space? Turns out, pretty much everyone. Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Spotify and Slack all have initiative in the works. It’s a lesson that the tech industry et large seems to have learned from Instagram and Snap, it’s not the idea that matters, it’s the execution. Furthermore, it’s not who was first, it’s who kept the growth going.
Chances are that this mass hug of copycats won’t produce a clear product “winner” but will commoditize the tech to death, at least in terms of Clubhouse’s boundless future.
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