Clubhouse will soon have major competition with Twitter Spaces too. It already has closed captioning, tweet based Q&A highlighting, and is integrated with Fleets. Looks to be the most meaningful update in a very long time for them.
Even podcasts, which I'd argue are more accessible than live rambling, are not a mass market product after more than a decade of trying.
Will audio-only eat up video and text platforms? No. Video can provide much more rich info and text can be much quicker to read and in loud places. But I do think there is a spot for live audio-only content, just don't know how big it is and how that changes when the pandemic subsides.
I think the real challenge is on the listening end. I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would sit around listening to people talk. If there's important information I need, I'll read it or watch a Youtube video. Audio is the least useful medium to absorb info. I'm sure some people feel otherwise, but we haven't seen a success in this space yet, and not for lack of investment/trying.
I think many people listen to people talk, especially at conferences. Imagine a panel discussion: if one is not in the first few rows, the visual info is quite little (can't see facial expressions much) and so it's mostly audio.
I guess for me, I like listening to live conversation, where it has the unpredictability of where it will go. I like to watch live interviews on TV and yet believe that many of them are stale, scripted, and too short, vs CH which yes can be stale but rarely feel scripted or too short. What I like about interviews or live conversations is that things may arise that one wouldn't think to produce without the external stimulation.
I wonder if it hasn't succeeded before because it didn't have the initial crowd. CH is basically just group conversations and if I go to a party where I think the people are not interesting (or more so, famous), I may not be so excited to talk/listen. But if I go to a private party, almost like going to a TED conference, I'm quite interested to hear those people talk to each other and myself try to contribute if I can. That's what it is, based on the audience it initially curated, it kinda felt like being at a TED or other similar conference. I wonder how that changes over time. But still, it lets ad-hoc conversations arise, sometimes with combinations that have not really happened on other platforms, e.g., Shane Battier, former NBA player, asking a question to Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator. Again, sometimes the interactions bore me, but sometimes they thrill me, and that feeds to the variable ratio reward addiction mechanism of the app.
> Even podcasts, which I'd argue are more accessible than live rambling, are not a mass market product after more than a decade of trying.
In the U.S., 37% of Americans surveyed by Edison Research listened to at least one podcast during the last month. (It was 32% the previous year.) That means podcasts are about 50% more popular than Twitter or LinkedIn. Is that not a mass medium?
http://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/The...
I also think we'd see a big advertising industry around podcasts. I have to admit to not being an expert in that particular market, but it sure doesn't seem like podcasts have the scale of other consumer social media.