Clubhouse

Clubhouse is a social app that allows users to spontaneously join group audio and text-based chat rooms. The platform is free to all users and does not offer any premium plans or charge any fee, while being ad-free. It was invite-only until July 2021, when it announced it was expanding access to everyone and did not require invitation (soon after its messaging feature “Backchannel” launch). Clubhouse has collected a sizeable roster of popular artists and celebrities including Drake, 21 Savage, Oprah Winfrey, Ashton Kutcher, Meek Mill, MC Hammer, Tiffany Haddish, and Mark Cuban on its platform. Over the first year (March 2020-2021), the Clubhouse app was downloaded more than 12 million times. As of April 2021, Clubhouse had 10 million weekly active users, including musicians, athletes, creators, comedians, and authors—though by July 2021, subscriber growth had reportedly slowed significantly. Reportedly, more than 700,000 rooms are created on the app daily as of September 2021.

France’s privacy watchdog, the CNIL, opened a probe into Clubhouse in March 2021 following a complaint and petition with more than 10,000 signatures requesting regulatory intervention. The petition raised concerns of potential privacy breaches and the sale of user contact details to third-parties by Clubhouse. The Hamburg privacy regulator also voiced its data security concerns over the same app in February 2021. If Clubhouse is found breaching the GDPR guidelines, the CNIL stated it would be able to apply its own sanctions on the app.

During 2021, the platform announced several improvements, including 1) “Clubhouse Creator First”, an accelerator program for creators (March 2021); 2) “Clubhouse Payments”, its first monetization feature for creators (April 2021) which enables fans to send money directly to the creator; 3) ‘exclusive audio chats’ launched in partnership with podcast media organization TED (July 2021); 4) “Backchannel”, a new 1:1 and group messaging feature (July 2021); 5) spatial audio effects, which give listeners a deeper awareness of the virtual surroundings (August 2021); 6) “Waves” that enables friends to have private conversations (September 2021); 7) “Replay” that allows hosts to record live rooms and save them to a club/ user profile to share later (November 2021).

In April 2021, Twitter reportedly had been in talks to acquire Clubhouse for USD 4 billion; however, these discussions were stalled for undisclosed reasons. In the same month, Clubhouse raised an undisclosed amount in a new Series C funding round led by return investor Andreessen Horowitz. This round quadrupled Clubhouse’s valuation to USD 4 billion. The funds are to prepare the team to support the platform’s international growth, develop its localization and accessibility features, introduce more creator-supportive programs, further invest in the discovery feature, and continue to expand the support and community health teams.