Clubhouse's Latest Strategic Shift Points to Concerning Signs for the App's Future
Is Clubhouse entering its final stage?
Over the last few weeks, the departures of several top executives from the company have raised eyebrows about its future, while the latest download numbers also point to trouble for the once buzzy audio social app.
The recent exec departures are also an important indicator in its current direction - as reported by Protocol:
“In late April, Stephanie Simon left as the company’s head of Brand Evangelism and Development. Simon joined Clubhouse just a couple of months after launch in 2020. Then this week, three more leaders announced their resignations, including Nina Gregory, Aarthi Ramamurthy and Anu Atluru; the trio led News, International and Community, respectively.”
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The gradual migration of content leaders points to a change in strategy for Clubhouse, with Bloomberg also reporting late last week that Clubhouse is making significant staffing moves as ’part of a broader restructuring and rethinking of the audio app’s strategy’.
That strategic shift, as noted by Platformer’s Casey Newton, is likely more aligned with less structured, and more casual usage of the app for catching up with friends and like-minded people, or ‘chilling’ online in these shared audio spaces.
Which makes sense, but it also aligns with this prediction from Blab founder Shaan Puri as to Clubhouse’s likely trajectory.
Puri, whose long tweet thread on what he foresaw happening to Clubhouse, also predicts the future downward spiral for the app, with chilling likely to end up being ’a dead end too’.
Puri would know, he’s worked on several buzzy apps, which, much like Clubhouse, saw strong performance early on, only to fade out time and time again. Because live content, in itself, is hard, and ensuring compelling, consistent experiences is near impossible in a user-generated live format, at any kind of scale.
That’s why Blab died out, along with Meerkat, and why live-stream elements on Facebook and Twitter never lived up to the massive hype, which had many enthusiasts calling the feature a ‘game changer’ and hurriedly updating their LinkedIn description to ‘live video strategist’ and the like. Read More...
