Roll out the red carpet, social media sensation Clubhouse is finally launching! That tagline might be a little confusing so allow us to explain.
While Clubhouse has been
truly phenomenal over the past few months, and has existed for over a year, up until now it’s only been available in beta form. This meant that it existed with several caveats and restrictions, including the infamous waitlist and invite system, the only way for prospective users to actually get in on the action. With the full release, everybody’s free to use the platform without limits.
Welcome to the Clubhouse
Clubhouse shared the news and took a look back at the incredibly successful year it’s had in a blog post.
“It’s been a rollercoaster first half of the year, and we’ve emerged much bigger than we were in January. Our team has gone from 8 people to 58. The number of daily rooms has grown from 50k to half a million. We’ve added 10M people to the community since we launched Android in mid-May, and seen 90M DMs sent since we launched Backchannel last week. The average listener now spends over an hour a day on Clubhouse, and a huge percentage of people don’t just listen, but actually talk. That’s our favorite part of the whole thing,” reads the announcement.
Clubhouse also echoes past sentiments, explaining that the waitlist and invite system, along with several other design choices, was in service of keeping growth small and manageable. Well, small in context. As you can see above, none of Clubhouse’s current numbers is objectively small.
The audio-only platform has had a crazy ride so far. It’s spawned countless lookalikes from other platforms (like Discord, Reddit, Facebook, and even LinkedIn), slowly added in worthwhile features, and even signed off on some exclusive content deals. One big decision to limit growth was keeping the platform Apple exclusive for a while. The beta opened up to Android users a few months ago.
Now that it’s officially here, and we reckon it’s got staying power, who knows what might come next for Clubhouse?