It’s the popular social media app that’s still at everyone in Silicon Valley’s fingertips: Clubhouse has announced its monetisation plans. And like most things it decided to do slightly differently, it’s planning on handling monetisation in a more… personal way. The app will soon allow users the ability to send money directly to their favourite creators.

Welcome to the Clubhouse, entry’s 5 bucks

That, instead of allowing ads onto the platform, is the developers’ solution to monetisation without being intrusive. Older social media monetisation models are quite broken, relying on user information and personal data tracking. We’ve even seen Twitter look towards the subscription model before, which will remove the need for ads and allow users to pay real money for the experience.

The Clubhouse solution makes sense, in that creators get paid directly by their fans. Almost like tipping a busker would work in real life. “100% of the payment will go to the creator. The person sending the money will also be charged a small card processing fee, which will go directly to our payment processing partner, Stripe,” Clubhouse details in a blog post.

“Clubhouse will take nothing”

Although admirable, it still begs the question: how will Clubhouse eventually become profitable or, at least make some money? At this stage, the whole thing is funded by venture capital, but it’s certainly not sustainable. It’ll need to start making some real money someday, and that may mean ads in the future.

We love Clubhouse’s focus on its users and creators. It’s nice to know a digital platform isn’t mining your personal info to serve you scarily relevant ads for things you never knew you wanted. But that doesn’t mean it never will…

Source: TechCrunch