Clubhouse Is the 'Big Stinker That Nobody Wants To Talk About'

Ed Zitron, CEO of national Media Relations and Public Relations company EZPR, writes about Clubhouse -- a one-year-old social audio app that is valued at $4 billion and is backed by several high-profile investors including A16z and Tiger Global and whose popularity appears to be on a decline: Yes, Clubhouse's vanity metrics say that people are creating '500,000 rooms a day,' and they've launched a DM feature, but seriously -- I am asking you, dear reader, do you know a single soul who has spent more than a few minutes on Clubhouse in the last 3 months? If you do, do they spend regular time on the app? Clubhouse is the elephant in the room in venture, and I believe there is a conscious attempt to not discuss it for fear that it proves that the entire conversation around it was hot air. When everyone desperately rushed to say that it was the next big thing, I asked repeatedly what exactly about it was going to be big, or change things. The answer mostly came down to the idea that we don't know what the future looks like, and that people were on the waitlist - which is no longer an excuse.

Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair was a rare case of dissent, making a clear warning that this was very much a pandemic app and nothing more -- but many people in venture and tech do not seem to want to discuss it as anything other than 'a big social network.' The Information questioned whether Clubhouse was the next Foursquare -- a promising company with tons of press that ultimately didn't reach the giddy heights it was 'meant to' -- but for the most part, people have remained either indifferent or positive about it. The fact this isn't regularly discussed is both a bad sign for the app and also a sign, in my opinion, of an industry-wide embarrassment. So many people rushed to join Clubhouse, or discuss what's big on Clubhouse, or how Clubhouse was the beginning of a 'social audio revolution' because they were afraid they'd miss out on the next TikTok, and I'd argue that the press did a woeful job at actually questioning the format. It feels as if there was an unquestioning conflation between an app being important and an app raising a bunch of money, and though one can say that the simple act of raising makes something important, it's irresponsible and embarrassing to run a single article on Clubhouse without questioning the format itself.

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