https://newzdoozy.com/why-is-everyone-starting-a-newsletter-or-podcast | February 6, 2021
“During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.”
— Mark Twain
“Newsletter platform Substack raises $15.3M round led by a16z”
— TechCrunch, July 2019
The contemporary cultural climate is being redefined by two experiments in the written and spoken word — the newsletter and podcast.
There seems to be an explosion of voices covering every topic conceivable, from politics, business and sports to sub-sub-specializations, like the impact of celestial objects on Bitcoin prices, best jogging shoes, or the quirks and oddities of New York’s boroughs.
Punditry, reportage and commentary is being delivered straight to our inboxes and phones, without any middlemen involved.
In signs that we have reached ‘Peak Content’, there are even newsletters about newsletters and podcasts about podcasts.
So what has spurred this phenomenon?
The answer, we propose, lies in three factors — Decentralization, Monetization and Imitation.
Let’s take a look.
Decentralization
The early internet was all about openness, inter-connectedness and the promise of a shared future.
Not anymore.
Now, the world wide web is beginning to balkanize into separate tribes with their own rituals, dogmas and contempt/indifference for outsiders. Like a British boarding school.
From internet to splinternet.
Our e-mail inboxes have become the latest battlefield where this trend is playing out.
While Old Media was about a big masthead and scores of journalists sheltering under its big umbrella, in the New Media every single reporter/editor is an independent publisher and a mini-brand.
Which means more choices than a sultan’s harem.
Instead of being forced to stay in an unhappy marriage of a newspaper subscription, readers can now have flings with whichever writers they find exciting. For many users, a weekly newsletter in their inbox from their adored author mirrors the intimacy and warmth love letters used to provide.
The one-on-one connect is a potent comforter in today’s volatile, uncertain times. There’s a reason why OnlyFans is so successful, despite the ubiquity of unclad damsels on the internet.
The mushrooming of alternate information highways is also fueled by a remarkable erosion of trust in mainstream media.
No Trump supporter believes anything written in The New York Times anymore. No educated person can tolerate Fox News. A thousand flowers are beginning to bloom in this wide spectrum between the moral high ground of the NYT and the low propaganda of Fox & Friends.
Decentralization, or to use a heavier word, disintermediation, is one of the biggest currents of contemporary times.
Just like Netflix and other streaming services have ‘unbundled’ the hundreds of channels cable TV networks carry, Substack and its peers are dismantling the fiefdoms of legacy news brands, one e-mail at a time.
Think about how Bitcoin has smashed the monopoly of central banks. Or, at a macro level, how a distributed, digital ledger can disrupt authoritarian systems like the government and academia.
However, this is not to suggest decentralization is an unalloyed good.
The disintegration of the open nature of the internet means some of the most interesting conversations today are happening in individual inboxes (and private Discord channels, Twitter DMs, Clubhouse chatrooms etc). Information once again risks being the exclusive preserve of the few, just like in medieval times only the elite could get access to manuscripts, while the vast majority of the people labored away in farms or died in battlefields.
Experts sharing their insights with only paying subscribers, leaving the rest of the population trapped in the vicious loops of mindless entertainment and brainwashing, is a dystopian cyberpunk not many of us had accounted for while ushering in the internet revolution.
Or is this another ploy by the elites to maintain status quo?
Monetization
Newsrooms have seen more heads roll recently than post-Revolution Paris.
As per a study by the University of North Carolina, around half of all the newspaper jobs in the US were eliminated between 2004 to 2019. (Source). The situation in other countries is just as dire, if not worse. The coronavirus pandemic further devastated an industry already tottering on the brink of collapse due to readers migrating to the internet and digital ad dollars under the vice-like grip of Google and Facebook.
Newsletters and podcasts offer a glimmer of hope to the swelling ranks of laid-off/furloughed journalists, who have grabbed the opportunity with all the fervor of a bishop in a brothel.
Not that the genre attracts only the caravan of misery. Some high profile names, like Casey Newton (tech reporter for The Verge), culture critic Anne Helen Petersen and political writer Matt Taibbi, among many others, have migrated to Substack to try their hands at this new way to monetize their captive audience.
The same goes for freelancers, side-hustlers and other denizens of the gig economy.
For a freelance content creator today, there are broadly two ways to earn a living online — genuflect at the altar of Google/Facebook, or ‘own’ your subscribers directly.
The current architecture of internet ad dollars means you must have thousands of clicks on your website before even thinking about making money. Besides, the never-ending rat race of chasing traffic often boils down to staying on top of SEO trends, which means a poor content creator has to spend more energy on topics like keywords, HTML tags and page ranks rather than honing his/her craft.
A personal e-mail list, in contrast, can provide a welcome relief from the tyranny of algorithm.
“With the subscription model, the numbers don’t have to be huge to produce meaningful revenue. If you can persuade a couple thousand people to pay you $5 a month, you’ll make $100,000 a year. It’s not easy – it takes time, dedication, and care – but it’s more doable than ever,” Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, wrote in his newsletter.
With this model, the time to profitability can be reduced to months or even days since writers don’t have to worry about things like web hosting, payments or billing.
For many freelancers, Substack was the first time they received a payment on time without dozens of follow-up mails, multiple invoices or prayer sessions.
The COVID-19 lockdown proved to be a double-bonus for the platform. Firstly, a lot of journalists were laid off, swelling the ranks of potential newsletter writers. And secondly, people had a lot of free time to catch up on their reading (after Netflix and doomscrolling on Twitter, of course).
According to the company, overall usage of the platform doubled and revenue increased 60% in the first three months of the pandemic.
Substack has more than 250,000 paid subscribers and many more unpaid ones. (The company takes a 10% cut for paid subscriptions. Writers can grow their audience via unpaid newsletters free of charge).
Its top 10 publishers bring in $7 million collectively in annualized revenue.
A key aspect of Substack’s ‘plug-and-play’ model is that writers are allowed to keep their subscriber e-mails and Stripe (payment) accounts, which means they can migrate to any other platform if they choose as they have a direct relationship with their audience.
Substack is “100% focused on subscriptions. We will never build advertising technology into Substack,” McKenzie said.
No advertising and no take-it-all-or-leave-it subscriptions of traditional media sounds like the future of journalism, at least for a big chunk of readers.
Imitation
A key characteristic of a stock market boom is not the outsized gains made by some traders, but the widespread belief held by most people that they too can play the game and make enormous profits.
By this parameter, we are in the midst of a ‘creator economy’ boom.
The eye-popping success stories of people like Joe Rogan (who inked a $100 million deal to move his podcast to Spotify) and startups like newsletter service Morning Brew (majority acquired by Business Insider at a valuation of $75 million) has spurred more such dreams of budding content creators with microphones and e-mail lists.
If the Paris of the 1920s produced more artists than art, we are reaching a point where content creators outnumber the actual content (at least in some niche segments).
The ‘hustlers’ often ignore the fact that Joe Rogan put in more than a decade of work, or that most successful writers have to labor anonymously for years before they are noticed. For now, it is all about living in the moment and using words like ‘influencer’ in Tinder profiles.
The copycat adoption of behaviors is how trends and fads are born. Be it fashion, or music tastes or hairstyles, the trajectory is the same — a few early trend-setters, followed by a steady stream of imitators hoping to replicate the success.
In his book “Microtrends“, Mark J Penn writes about how small, under-the-radar currents often make big waves.
“There are no longer a couple of megaforces sweeping us all along. Instead, America and the world are being pulled apart by an intricate maze of choices, accumulating in ‘microtrends’…that can involve as little as 1 percent of the population, but which are powerfully shaping our society,” he writes.
The mushrooming of different voices is welcome, of course. But then be prepared for side effects, such as a messed up noise-to-signals ratio.
For example, here’s what 50-70 percent of a typical podcast sounds like:
Host: ….so maybe we can, like, circle back to the entire issue because it is really important to have a dialogue on the subject…
Guest 1: I’m so glad you brought that up and if I can just point out, you know, how essential it is to re-imagine the whole concept..
Guest 2: …yeah, basically disrupt the whole paradigm, you know
H: Yeah, yeah…and if I can pick your brain on it as well…
G2: Oh I’ve been having this conversation for so long…and, like, one of my friends works at Snap, right, and he was telling me…
H: Nice….
G2: Yeah, whatever, but it’s not like, you know, Tesla…
G1: Yeah, I bet Elon digs that…
H: Lets go to Mars…hahaha
G2: Hahaha
G1: Yeah, so, as I was saying, look, here’s the thing…basically it’s so important to iterate and ideate on the topic because…
G2: And leverage…
G1: Yeah, leverage is important as we got to bootstrap it for the first few rounds you know…
H: Yeah, yeah…as I discussed in my previous podcast…maybe I can put the link in there somewhere…so as I was discussing with Chris and Jack and Brandon…
G2: Has Jack sold his Lamborghini yet…hahaha..
H: Hahaha…yeah I think not….and that’s where we need to ramp up the bandwith as well, you know
G1: Absolutely, absolutely…
H: Yeah, so as I was saying, we need to circle back and have a hacker’s mindset on the entire matter, you know, to unleash synergies and maybe take it to the cloud…
G2: Oh I think we need that optionality…
G1: Totally, totally…that would be, like, so awesome…
A Typical Podcast
The endless small talk, lame insider jokes and repetition may not be a deliberate ploy, but just goes to show how extremely difficult it is to generate valuable insight consistently for an extended period of time.
The same with newsletters.
One of the first things newsletter subscribers learn is that not many writers have the chops to deliver crisp, insightful and engaging 1,000-word pieces week after week.
And that the vanishing breed of editors should be classified as essential workers. Just like catching a glimpse of your favorite Hollywood star without make-up can be a blood-curdling experience, most writers can be pretty ghoulish without a team of editors, sub-editors and fact checkers to smoothen their rough edges.
No wonder many newsletters, after a stellar first few weeks, take a turn towards the genre of ‘assorted Twitter comments, with the writer’s hot-takes added at suitable intervals’.
To overcome this limitation, some Substack writers are now bundling their subscriptions, offering readers an experience to a traditional publication with varied voices. So basically like subscribing to a regular newspaper or magazine. Or, as Silicon Valley likes to call it, re-inventing the wheel.
But still, the larger systemic issue remains. How long before the newsletter novelty wears off? And how many individual subscriptions can a person manage before giving up and retreating to the warm embrace of ‘ignorance is bliss’?
Will Audio Kill the Video Star?
Early humans learned to speak way before they could write. Estimates vary wildly, but linguists agree speech evolved more than 200,000 years ago. In contrast, the origin of writing dates back to some 5,500 years.
This enormous gap of multiple millennia has shaped our psyche in more ways than we realize.
Speech makes a far stronger neurochemical impact on us than reading and writing. Humans have sat around fires and recited stories for ages. That’s how our myths were born, our histories transmitted and our cultures shaped.
Of course, there is a wide gulf between the bardic tales of yore and some random podcaster rambling on about dogecoin, but even today, the experience of getting lost in a deep, engaging conversation is remarkably soothing and hard to replicate by any other media.
Many podcast enthusiasts say they are hooked to the voice and heart-to-heart connect with the speaker, rather than what he/she might actually be saying. Remember the looooong phone calls with our school sweethearts, where what was said was not as important as who was saying those sweet nothings?
Even being in a room full of sparkling conversations can lift our spirits, even if we don’t participate in the exchanges ourselves. Despite the ‘lone wolf’ personas we like to project, at heart all of us crave company and social inclusion.
Which is what Silicon Valley has figured out.
After years of emphasis on video (like YouTube, Facebook videos, Dailymotion etc), tech companies are now pivoting towards an audio-only experience, which is fast becoming the buzziest social media niche.
In mid-2020, voice chat app Clubhouse raised $12 million at a valuation of $100 million (Source). With less than 5,000 beta phase users. And no app.
Later in January this year, it raised some $100 million, valuing it at $1 billion. Pretty impressive, considering it makes 0 revenue, does not have an Android app and is still invite-only.
Clubhouse is like a cross between live podcasts and a virtual conference call with dozens of speakers. There are multiple chatrooms where users can drop in and listen to the conversations. Users can also participate, if allowed by the room’s moderator.
Having a Clubhouse invite is the new status symbol in some circles, with celebrities and plenty of high-profile investors gushing about the platform. In the last few days, Clubhouse has seen cameos by Tesla CEO and meme lord Elon Musk as well as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, which has ratcheted up the craze for the app.
Maybe the prolonged lockdowns have made tech bros nostalgic about watercooler chats. Or perhaps being privy to ‘insider gossip’ is a powerful aphrodisiac. Whatever the reason, some venture capitalists and tech analysts are so bullish on the app that they predict Clubhouse growing into a $100 billion company.
Even tech titans are jumping on the bandwagon. Twitter is beta testing its own audio chat rooms called Spaces, while a host of other founders are tinkering with the audio-first approach for both individuals and businesses.
So is #Audio typical Silicon Valley exuberance? Or just the human psyche reclaiming lost ground? Perhaps some Clubhouse chatroom is discussing this topic at this very moment? Please do let us know if you happen to get an invite.
“During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.”
— Mark Twain
“Newsletter platform Substack raises $15.3M round led by a16z”
— TechCrunch, July 2019
The contemporary cultural climate is being redefined by two experiments in the written and spoken word — the newsletter and podcast.
There seems to be an explosion of voices covering every topic conceivable, from politics, business and sports to sub-sub-specializations, like the impact of celestial objects on Bitcoin prices, best jogging shoes, or the quirks and oddities of New York’s boroughs.
Punditry, reportage and commentary is being delivered straight to our inboxes and phones, without any middlemen involved.
In signs that we have reached ‘Peak Content’, there are even newsletters about newsletters and podcasts about podcasts.
So what has spurred this phenomenon?
The answer, we propose, lies in three factors — Decentralization, Monetization and Imitation.
Let’s take a look.
Decentralization
The early internet was all about openness, inter-connectedness and the promise of a shared future.
Not anymore.
Now, the world wide web is beginning to balkanize into separate tribes with their own rituals, dogmas and contempt/indifference for outsiders. Like a British boarding school.
From internet to splinternet.
Our e-mail inboxes have become the latest battlefield where this trend is playing out.
While Old Media was about a big masthead and scores of journalists sheltering under its big umbrella, in the New Media every single reporter/editor is an independent publisher and a mini-brand.
Which means more choices than a sultan’s harem.
Instead of being forced to stay in an unhappy marriage of a newspaper subscription, readers can now have flings with whichever writers they find exciting. For many users, a weekly newsletter in their inbox from their adored author mirrors the intimacy and warmth love letters used to provide.
The one-on-one connect is a potent comforter in today’s volatile, uncertain times. There’s a reason why OnlyFans is so successful, despite the ubiquity of unclad damsels on the internet.
The mushrooming of alternate information highways is also fueled by a remarkable erosion of trust in mainstream media.
No Trump supporter believes anything written in The New York Times anymore. No educated person can tolerate Fox News. A thousand flowers are beginning to bloom in this wide spectrum between the moral high ground of the NYT and the low propaganda of Fox & Friends.
Decentralization, or to use a heavier word, disintermediation, is one of the biggest currents of contemporary times.
Just like Netflix and other streaming services have ‘unbundled’ the hundreds of channels cable TV networks carry, Substack and its peers are dismantling the fiefdoms of legacy news brands, one e-mail at a time.
Think about how Bitcoin has smashed the monopoly of central banks. Or, at a macro level, how a distributed, digital ledger can disrupt authoritarian systems like the government and academia.
However, this is not to suggest decentralization is an unalloyed good.
The disintegration of the open nature of the internet means some of the most interesting conversations today are happening in individual inboxes (and private Discord channels, Twitter DMs, Clubhouse chatrooms etc). Information once again risks being the exclusive preserve of the few, just like in medieval times only the elite could get access to manuscripts, while the vast majority of the people labored away in farms or died in battlefields.
Experts sharing their insights with only paying subscribers, leaving the rest of the population trapped in the vicious loops of mindless entertainment and brainwashing, is a dystopian cyberpunk not many of us had accounted for while ushering in the internet revolution.
Or is this another ploy by the elites to maintain status quo?
Monetization
Newsrooms have seen more heads roll recently than post-Revolution Paris.
As per a study by the University of North Carolina, around half of all the newspaper jobs in the US were eliminated between 2004 to 2019. (Source). The situation in other countries is just as dire, if not worse. The coronavirus pandemic further devastated an industry already tottering on the brink of collapse due to readers migrating to the internet and digital ad dollars under the vice-like grip of Google and Facebook.
Newsletters and podcasts offer a glimmer of hope to the swelling ranks of laid-off/furloughed journalists, who have grabbed the opportunity with all the fervor of a bishop in a brothel.
Not that the genre attracts only the caravan of misery. Some high profile names, like Casey Newton (tech reporter for The Verge), culture critic Anne Helen Petersen and political writer Matt Taibbi, among many others, have migrated to Substack to try their hands at this new way to monetize their captive audience.
The same goes for freelancers, side-hustlers and other denizens of the gig economy.
For a freelance content creator today, there are broadly two ways to earn a living online — genuflect at the altar of Google/Facebook, or ‘own’ your subscribers directly.
The current architecture of internet ad dollars means you must have thousands of clicks on your website before even thinking about making money. Besides, the never-ending rat race of chasing traffic often boils down to staying on top of SEO trends, which means a poor content creator has to spend more energy on topics like keywords, HTML tags and page ranks rather than honing his/her craft.
A personal e-mail list, in contrast, can provide a welcome relief from the tyranny of algorithm.
“With the subscription model, the numbers don’t have to be huge to produce meaningful revenue. If you can persuade a couple thousand people to pay you $5 a month, you’ll make $100,000 a year. It’s not easy – it takes time, dedication, and care – but it’s more doable than ever,” Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, wrote in his newsletter.
With this model, the time to profitability can be reduced to months or even days since writers don’t have to worry about things like web hosting, payments or billing.
For many freelancers, Substack was the first time they received a payment on time without dozens of follow-up mails, multiple invoices or prayer sessions.
The COVID-19 lockdown proved to be a double-bonus for the platform. Firstly, a lot of journalists were laid off, swelling the ranks of potential newsletter writers. And secondly, people had a lot of free time to catch up on their reading (after Netflix and doomscrolling on Twitter, of course).
According to the company, overall usage of the platform doubled and revenue increased 60% in the first three months of the pandemic.
Substack has more than 250,000 paid subscribers and many more unpaid ones. (The company takes a 10% cut for paid subscriptions. Writers can grow their audience via unpaid newsletters free of charge).
Its top 10 publishers bring in $7 million collectively in annualized revenue.
A key aspect of Substack’s ‘plug-and-play’ model is that writers are allowed to keep their subscriber e-mails and Stripe (payment) accounts, which means they can migrate to any other platform if they choose as they have a direct relationship with their audience.
Substack is “100% focused on subscriptions. We will never build advertising technology into Substack,” McKenzie said.
No advertising and no take-it-all-or-leave-it subscriptions of traditional media sounds like the future of journalism, at least for a big chunk of readers.
Imitation
A key characteristic of a stock market boom is not the outsized gains made by some traders, but the widespread belief held by most people that they too can play the game and make enormous profits.
By this parameter, we are in the midst of a ‘creator economy’ boom.
The eye-popping success stories of people like Joe Rogan (who inked a $100 million deal to move his podcast to Spotify) and startups like newsletter service Morning Brew (majority acquired by Business Insider at a valuation of $75 million) has spurred more such dreams of budding content creators with microphones and e-mail lists.
If the Paris of the 1920s produced more artists than art, we are reaching a point where content creators outnumber the actual content (at least in some niche segments).
The ‘hustlers’ often ignore the fact that Joe Rogan put in more than a decade of work, or that most successful writers have to labor anonymously for years before they are noticed. For now, it is all about living in the moment and using words like ‘influencer’ in Tinder profiles.
The copycat adoption of behaviors is how trends and fads are born. Be it fashion, or music tastes or hairstyles, the trajectory is the same — a few early trend-setters, followed by a steady stream of imitators hoping to replicate the success.
In his book “Microtrends“, Mark J Penn writes about how small, under-the-radar currents often make big waves.
“There are no longer a couple of megaforces sweeping us all along. Instead, America and the world are being pulled apart by an intricate maze of choices, accumulating in ‘microtrends’…that can involve as little as 1 percent of the population, but which are powerfully shaping our society,” he writes.
The mushrooming of different voices is welcome, of course. But then be prepared for side effects, such as a messed up noise-to-signals ratio.
For example, here’s what 50-70 percent of a typical podcast sounds like:
Host: ….so maybe we can, like, circle back to the entire issue because it is really important to have a dialogue on the subject…
Guest 1: I’m so glad you brought that up and if I can just point out, you know, how essential it is to re-imagine the whole concept..
Guest 2: …yeah, basically disrupt the whole paradigm, you know
H: Yeah, yeah…and if I can pick your brain on it as well…
G2: Oh I’ve been having this conversation for so long…and, like, one of my friends works at Snap, right, and he was telling me…
H: Nice….
G2: Yeah, whatever, but it’s not like, you know, Tesla…
G1: Yeah, I bet Elon digs that…
H: Lets go to Mars…hahaha
G2: Hahaha
G1: Yeah, so, as I was saying, look, here’s the thing…basically it’s so important to iterate and ideate on the topic because…
G2: And leverage…
G1: Yeah, leverage is important as we got to bootstrap it for the first few rounds you know…
H: Yeah, yeah…as I discussed in my previous podcast…maybe I can put the link in there somewhere…so as I was discussing with Chris and Jack and Brandon…
G2: Has Jack sold his Lamborghini yet…hahaha..
H: Hahaha…yeah I think not….and that’s where we need to ramp up the bandwith as well, you know
G1: Absolutely, absolutely…
H: Yeah, so as I was saying, we need to circle back and have a hacker’s mindset on the entire matter, you know, to unleash synergies and maybe take it to the cloud…
G2: Oh I think we need that optionality…
G1: Totally, totally…that would be, like, so awesome…
A Typical Podcast
The endless small talk, lame insider jokes and repetition may not be a deliberate ploy, but just goes to show how extremely difficult it is to generate valuable insight consistently for an extended period of time.
The same with newsletters.
One of the first things newsletter subscribers learn is that not many writers have the chops to deliver crisp, insightful and engaging 1,000-word pieces week after week.
And that the vanishing breed of editors should be classified as essential workers. Just like catching a glimpse of your favorite Hollywood star without make-up can be a blood-curdling experience, most writers can be pretty ghoulish without a team of editors, sub-editors and fact checkers to smoothen their rough edges.
No wonder many newsletters, after a stellar first few weeks, take a turn towards the genre of ‘assorted Twitter comments, with the writer’s hot-takes added at suitable intervals’.
To overcome this limitation, some Substack writers are now bundling their subscriptions, offering readers an experience to a traditional publication with varied voices. So basically like subscribing to a regular newspaper or magazine. Or, as Silicon Valley likes to call it, re-inventing the wheel.
But still, the larger systemic issue remains. How long before the newsletter novelty wears off? And how many individual subscriptions can a person manage before giving up and retreating to the warm embrace of ‘ignorance is bliss’?
Will Audio Kill the Video Star?
Early humans learned to speak way before they could write. Estimates vary wildly, but linguists agree speech evolved more than 200,000 years ago. In contrast, the origin of writing dates back to some 5,500 years.
This enormous gap of multiple millennia has shaped our psyche in more ways than we realize.
Speech makes a far stronger neurochemical impact on us than reading and writing. Humans have sat around fires and recited stories for ages. That’s how our myths were born, our histories transmitted and our cultures shaped.
Of course, there is a wide gulf between the bardic tales of yore and some random podcaster rambling on about dogecoin, but even today, the experience of getting lost in a deep, engaging conversation is remarkably soothing and hard to replicate by any other media.
Many podcast enthusiasts say they are hooked to the voice and heart-to-heart connect with the speaker, rather than what he/she might actually be saying. Remember the looooong phone calls with our school sweethearts, where what was said was not as important as who was saying those sweet nothings?
Even being in a room full of sparkling conversations can lift our spirits, even if we don’t participate in the exchanges ourselves. Despite the ‘lone wolf’ personas we like to project, at heart all of us crave company and social inclusion.
Which is what Silicon Valley has figured out.
After years of emphasis on video (like YouTube, Facebook videos, Dailymotion etc), tech companies are now pivoting towards an audio-only experience, which is fast becoming the buzziest social media niche.
In mid-2020, voice chat app Clubhouse raised $12 million at a valuation of $100 million (Source). With less than 5,000 beta phase users. And no app.
Later in January this year, it raised some $100 million, valuing it at $1 billion. Pretty impressive, considering it makes 0 revenue, does not have an Android app and is still invite-only.
Clubhouse is like a cross between live podcasts and a virtual conference call with dozens of speakers. There are multiple chatrooms where users can drop in and listen to the conversations. Users can also participate, if allowed by the room’s moderator.
Having a Clubhouse invite is the new status symbol in some circles, with celebrities and plenty of high-profile investors gushing about the platform. In the last few days, Clubhouse has seen cameos by Tesla CEO and meme lord Elon Musk as well as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, which has ratcheted up the craze for the app.
Maybe the prolonged lockdowns have made tech bros nostalgic about watercooler chats. Or perhaps being privy to ‘insider gossip’ is a powerful aphrodisiac. Whatever the reason, some venture capitalists and tech analysts are so bullish on the app that they predict Clubhouse growing into a $100 billion company.
Even tech titans are jumping on the bandwagon. Twitter is beta testing its own audio chat rooms called Spaces, while a host of other founders are tinkering with the audio-first approach for both individuals and businesses.
So is #Audio typical Silicon Valley exuberance? Or just the human psyche reclaiming lost ground? Perhaps some Clubhouse chatroom is discussing this topic at this very moment? Please do let us know if you happen to get an invite.
