Born, burned, died: how Clubhouse took over the internet for three months, lost popularity and left a legacy

Clubhouse is a one-day butterfly by the standards of modern social networks.

The service went from the peak of popularity to the doldrums in the three months between February and April 2021. During that time, Clubhouse managed to attract the entire Internet to its discussions, all the major social networks copied its functions, and then it faded as quickly as it grew.

The former TJ editor looks back on his own experience and explains how he lived, where he went, and what he left behind one of the year's most controversial internet phenomena.

Breaking down barriers between people - how Clubhouse conquered the internet.

The Clubhouse story began in the midst of the first lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic - it could well be called a product of its time. With self-isolation and constant restrictions, people around the world had an increased need for verbal communication - and the service was one of those that helped close it.

Clubhouse became available in March 2020, but at first it was used by only a few thousand people - mostly Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and enthusiasts. Subsequently, it was this audience that played a key role and led the social network to success, albeit short-lived, worldwide.

At first, the service grew very slowly, steadily and gradually. The project gained its initial audience of 1,500 people thanks to founder Paul Davison, who had worked on unconventional social networks before and had made a name for himself in the Valley. The app wasn't in the AppStore at the time - it required a TestFlight environment and an invitation to test it.

As with early Facebook, the closed nature only helped Clubhouse get off to a good start. At first, startup founders and already successful entrepreneurs from California were invited there. This gave rise to a community on the service that, in real life, is difficult to get into "off the street".

The social networking site followed Silicon Valley and attracted celebrities. In the summer of 2020, Jared Leto, Chris Rock and Oprah Winfrey made appearances on the service. By the end of the year, Clubhouse had reached 600,000 registered users and began to become popular in the US.

The service became truly mainstream already in 2021, when it began to sharply gain popularity outside the United States. By this point, its growth could hardly be called gradual - in just 10 days in January the application grew from three to five million users, and then in less than a week it added another million.

The final straw in the recipe for taking over the world was Ilon Musk - the entrepreneur unexpectedly came to Clubhouse on the night of February 1. Tens of thousands of listeners followed Musk's speech, many of whom did not fit into the original room, so they listened to a "re-post" of the speech in neighbouring rooms.

The entrepreneur made no big announcements, the talk was drenched in lightness and spontaneity - Musk even managed to argue with the founder of Robinhood about financial services. The conversation was followed by major media outlets like Bloomberg, CNBC and TechCrunch, which released transcripts of the conversation. After that, it was hard not to know about Clubhouse.

The next big guest just a week later was the head of Meta (then Facebook), Mark Zuckerberg. His participation was more formal - he registered as Zuck23 and spoke in an interview about the future technologies that the Facebook Reality Labs group was working on.

In Russia, Clubhouse began to gain popularity in February - immediately after Musk and Zuckerberg's speeches. In many ways, the service repeated its own path in the Valley, but not in 10 months but in 90 days: the first to join were local opinion leaders and entrepreneurs, who quickly formed an active community.

Within a week, the number of Russians on the service had already doubled, to a hundred thousand people. The Russian Clubhouse quickly established its own formats, rules of the game, tone of discussion and opinion leaders. One of the most popular and longest-running was the "Who's Who and Why's Who" room, which was jokingly created by several users with a background in media and marketing.

Not a product, but a function - why Clubhouse didn't sustain success and what it left behind

The initial "closed" nature of the social network created a vicious circle of interest: people from outside wanted in and users who got in felt comfortable because of the high entry threshold. On the other hand, this turned out to be the main problem of the Klabhaus - its value was held on a core audience of intellectuals, who were difficult to retain while making a mass service at the same time.

The original strategy fully justified the name - Clubhouse. The service was essentially a digital version of the American "clubs" that Zuckerberg so desperately tried to get into in the film The Social Network. These were closed "insiders' parties" with invitations that were not given to everyone.

The main problem with the service was its lack of clear positioning.

It turned out that it was generally unclear why to use it every day if there were no high-profile faces or meaningful discussions.

Another problem with Clubhouse was the lack of a unique proposition, which would be difficult for competitors to borrow. At first, it was an audience that was difficult to gather in one place, but it dispersed because of the mass appeal, and the service was unable to offer anything more.

The most famous example of a similar situation is the Stories format. It was first invented by Snapchat, but many more people now know about Stories because of Instagram. Facebook promptly copied and incorporated the feature into all of its products.