Have the chatrooms lost their charm?
Where is the chatroom? During the pandemic there was lots of publicity around Clubhouse and its conversations, celebrities included. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and others launched competing audio services with chats. Now it seems some are gently down-sizing the audio focus. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is leaving its podcast platform. Spotify quietly shut down its live audio app creator fund.
Meta is focusing on the metaverse and on short video to fight successful TikTok. Spotify’s Greenroom has changed name and is now Spotify Live with livestreaming in the Spotify app and as a standalone app.
Clubhouse recently laid off multiple employees, according to people familiar with the reductions, news agency Bloomberg reports.
“Some employees chose to leave on their own as the company cuts back some of the programming areas it had focused on before, such as sports, news and international, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private”, Bloomberg said.
During the pandemic also giants like Amazon and Sirius XM spent heavily on audio with shows, chatrooms and pods. At a peak early 2021, Clubhouse was valued at USD 4 billion and audio was the big thing in social media.
Clubhouse itself said the app had more than 2.6 million downloads in December last year. At its peak, it was reported to have reached 8 million downloads in one month but that fell to 1 million in April 2021.
At the end of 2021, Clubhouse was reported to have 10 million registered users after having stopped being available on invitation only.
When launched, Clubhouse was available only on invitation. Each member could invite maximum two other persons to the House. Creating exclusivity is an old and successful trick in marketing. That exclusivity was quietly later removed and it is now an open.
There are many theories why social media audio chatrooms was such a success – at least for a while during the pandemic. Some say it is explained by the timing as Clubhouse launched the chatrooms in the middle of the pandemic with people forced to stay at home and not socialize. So, a chatroom with lots of people was very attractive. Others said a room with just talk is restful compared to the back-to-back business video calls during the pandemic.
To start with, Clubhouse gave the impression that chatroom was just a social contribution in a time of isolation because of the pandemic. However, it did not take long for the marketing people to see the potential in well filled chatrooms with for instance influencers as hosts.
Spotify launched the Greenroom where musicians and content creators should use Greenroom to stay in contact with their audience via live audio. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Reddit and Slack launched services that were direct competitors to Clubhouse.
Today, people still talk in the chatrooms but there is less talk about chatrooms as a phenomenon.
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