Will Clubhouse go on mute?

You’ll call me the king of paradoxical writing, right? Only last fortnight, I published an article on how audio is going to be the next big social media medium. And today, I am already talking about the death of Clubhouse; so much for long product lifecycles, innovative mediums and unicorn startups. Well look, don’t get me wrong, audio mediums are here to stay.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok have all invested gazillions of dollars on developing meeting rooms and launching them before asap. Twitter is already testing its version of audio rooms in beta and planning to open it up to all users by next month. Clubhouse on the other hand has not even opened up the app to everyone. It hasn’t rolled out open access to LATAM or MENA & its android expansion is a at least a couple of months away. With other social media giants already circling on the audio space, Clubhouse may come last in the race it had the largest lead in.

But that’s not the only problem Clubhouse needs to tackle. While opening up the app is one thing, keep it interesting is another ballgame altogether. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have long had access to consumer engagement, behavioral analysis and have constantly evolving discovery algorithms which would make it easier for them to showcase relevant and interesting content.

It is a fact the future of successful products is going to be based on personalized experience and a conversational narrative. As Clubhouse grows, the sheer breadth of broadcasts will be humongous. And sifting through all those LIVE broadcast to provide a personalized experience ‘at the moment’ is going to be extremely difficult. When you open facebook, Instagram or twitter, it has millions of content pieces to display but for Clubhouse to display juicy LIVE content is the main challenge, especially when the content is horizontal focused across every category. Remember Quora? Use it as often as 1 year ago? Well, you get it.

Even in a scenario where Clubhouse manages to refresh the interestingness of content, and showcase really REALLY relevant audio rooms to join, one will still miss other ongoing interesting conversations. But then one may think that the easiest solution to cross this hurdle is to start recording content and play the juiciest content to the listener every time they log in! Wrong. That’s totally opposite to the value proposition of Clubhouse. LIVE content is their product, not recorded. Besides, recorded content has its own challenges. Netflix has been working on providing the best user experience with recorded content ever since they launched but they still haven’t figured out the magic potion. And even if Clubhouse launches recorded shows, its growth will become sluggish because listeners will login not to consume fresh content but to browse relevant content, in their free time, like how you browsed Instagram 10 minutes ago, for may be 10 seconds? That’s how. But on Instagram, you had friends, here, you don’t.

It is going to be a tough ask for Clubhouse to solve the interesting content problem.