ClubhouseTea #003: The Billion Dollar Thought Bubble
The value of this stream is a penny for your thoughts; audible consciousness as a commodity reaped a high valuation!
Fresh & hot tea now available an dem Clubhaüs!
Cultural snapshot - we’re in week three! Sheesh!
Clubhouse Town Hall patch notes + soothsaying vibes on the distant future for Clubhouse 🔮 (1.24) town hall included in this issue? ok! wasn’t that long!
According to Apptopia, Clubhouse is #1 in Germany and Czech Republic!
The Gang Gets Through Inauguration Week!
“I got the game in a squeeze, Who disagree? I wanna see one of y’all run up a B”
- Drake, on “No Stylist” by French Montana
Earlier this weekend, The Information broke the news that several venture capital firms including a16z would be investing in the latest round of funding, bringing Clubhouse’s current valuation to a pretty sum of $1 billion. Clubhouse’s Series B funding and a16z’s newest investment in Clubhouse is being led by Andrew Chen along with 180 other investors that count themselves within the ranks along with early investors who participated in Clubhouse’s VERY early community investment session natively in the app. It is an unusual amount for a social app, but investors seem confident that Clubhouse could become the next big thing.
Clubhouse is an interesting platform and people clearly see the potential in the world of audio social, but it has not been without its controversy. There are factors holding Clubhouse back, one of which users feel that company has not responded adequately to requests for increased moderation. With far-right groups deplatformed on mainstream networks, Clubhouse could become a new breeding ground for dangerous ideologies. Additionally, Twitter's competing Spaces may prove to be a competitive partner that may beat out Clubhouse as they are less exclusive and garner a much larger userbase.
Nevertheless, Clubhouse's newest round of funding is shaping up to be quite interesting. At least, that’s worth a lot of Trident Layers gum.
NOTE: Our Town Hall coverage below will allude more to how Clubhouse will be allocating funding related to their Series B for their operations.
Clubhouse in a New Language
Clubhouse is expanding its geographic reach. Non-English audiences all over the world and are creating their own rooms and spaces. From language-affinity clubs to Instagram accounts with invite chains, the app is expanding into new niches abroad.
This week’s most notable new audience was from Germany and Clubhouse became Clubhaüs. On Tuesday and Wednesday, several German-speaking panels showed up in English-speaking hallways. With over 18.6K+ users from the European nation, it will be interesting to see how Clubhouse becomes localized for the non-English world.
Outside of native language speakers around the world joining Clubhouse, a much pronounced desire we saw in the community was to normalize foreign language learning and simply launching different conversations that addressed all skill levels for languages like Spanish, Finnish, Korean, Mandarin, etc. A more globalized Clubhouse allows us to modernize the penpal function and access conversation settings that were much difficult to access pre-pandemic. Clubs like Maison Club, Mandarin Learners Club, and Lingo Lounge have adopted more frequent educational programming towards languages that appeal to community members that may want to immerse in more foreign conversation during the pandemic.
Cultural Snapshot - Week Three (Other Happenings)
During inauguration week, people sought to create rooms to celebrate the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden. A lot of triumph and also a lot of reflection on the past four years with former President, Donald J. Trump. Some echoes on Clubhouse discussed the possibility of Trump coming to Clubhouse (yes, really) and a room titled "Kamala Harris vs. Candace Owens - who would you take home?" really got us rolling our eyes
“We did it Joe! You’re going to be the next president of the United States.”
Kamala Harris, Vice President of the USA
Every night, LA-based musician Axel Mansoor provides a sonically tranquil aural experience thru Lullaby Club every night at 9pm PST. Hundreds of people flood into the room to hear lullabies and seranades in acoustic fashion and people onstage give their approval thru ASMR-like conversational tone. Even LaKeith Stanfield was found in the audience voicing his approval for the vibes.
Celebrities and industry professionals have been using Clubhouse to give more interactive AMAs. Influential figures like Deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman) and Gary Vaynerchuk have been utilizing the Clubhouse platform to really engage more intimately with an audience, the latter of which considered “moving [his] podcast [on Clubhouse]” altogether and that audio is a “return to how humans used to share stories through time”.
The music industry this week got into the topic of crypto art NFTs in depth, by which many music industry professionals and people in the crypto art space discuss the recent drop culture of NFT collaborations with musicians like 3LAU and RAC
Controversy in the air this week is to be expected as several rooms throughout the week trended on Twitter including a discussion room titled “Black people should invest in prison stocks”, another titled “Meg V. Tori: Charges Dropped”, and a song analysis room of DaniLeigh’s colorist song “Yellowbone”
Bomani X is lowkey Tom from MySpace but for Clubhouse
Also, this picture below. Creativity knows no bounds.
Recording Ethics: Recording rooms remains a topic of conversation on Clubhouse. While there are policies prohibiting screen-recording, this does not prevent people from using an alternative device. Additionally, many rooms will disclose that they are recording. For example, when there are CH Musical auditions, someone is recording. Users will consent to being recorded when entering the room.
What happens if someone does not disclose or receive consent to record the room? At the moment… nothing. While it is a violation of Clubhouse’s Terms of Services, the odds of the company taking action are slim. This, however, may not stop you from legal action down the line if your recording is leaked.
If you are planning to record a room, disclose in the title and get verbal consent on stage.
Be a good Clubhouse citizen. Obey Big Brother. YOLO.
Missed the Clubhouse Town Hall today?
Here’s an outline:
During the Clubhouse Town Hall today (1.24.21), Paul Davison and Rohan Seth mentioned what was shipped in the past few days, what is to come, and also a little consolation of what is happening with Clubhouse in terms of its billion dollar valuation.
Andrew Chen of a16z leading CH series B, $1B valuation
Over 180+ investors on clubhouse invested in latest rvaluation round
#1 social app in Germany and Czech Republic according to Apptopia
More than 3M+ registered users as of today
2,473,478 DAU as of January 21 (7:29pm EST)
Town Hall (1.24.2021)
Clubhouse is moving quickly today, more quicker than before
The given average session time on CH: 90mins
Largest (1000+) Non-English speaking room (go Germans!)
Funds from this latest round of investment will be used for the following:
to launch development of Clubhouse Android app
add more users in general
keep the servers up and running better than ever (scaling up technology and infrastructure)
fast support (trust and safety included)
improving ranking and discovery (spotlight creators, feed filtration, etc.)
What they rolled out:
Rooms are now hideable on the hallway
Bug fixes
Hand raise queue options and optimizations
Club following section now shows most recent followers on top
What’s to come:
Optimizing Room quality
Optimizing higher quality audio
Pushing one-off events on CH (tailored onboarding flow for specific outsiders for this who may not be users of Clubhouse yet but want to)
Sharing a link internally in the room (sharing for outside of Clubhouse as well)
Fixing routing and access for web customer journey when interacting with Clubhouse events
Easier reporting for trolls
Release after the upcoming client release:
Early experimentation of tipping and monetization (tickets, tipping, subscriptions)
Creator Grant program 👀 (update in 3-6mos); it is much different from the Creator Pilot Program (just a trial one-off for feedback) that was reported in December
In the distant future???
Localization of Clubhouse
Workaround for desktop version of Clubhouse
That should be all. Tune in every Sunday for more coverage!
I’m on this bird app, Twitter, so tweet at me: @choi_clint. You can also find me on clubhouse: @clint. Lauren Huttner, our ClubhouseTea co-head, can be found on Twitter @Lauren_Huttner ~
Please share this with your friends. The hot goss is worth sharing with friends, so let them know that yes, Clubhouse is our beat. If there’s anything you think should be covered as a Clubhouse trendy/cultural topic for a given week, feel free to let me know!