CLUBHOUSE GOLDRUSH 🎙️
Zuck/Dorsey announce plans to rival Clubhouse App
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ZUCK VS. CLUBHOUSE
Just 5 days ago Mark Zuckerberg joined Clubhouse with the handle “Zuck23”. Quite frankly I find this hilarious because the emperor of social media himself couldn’t even secure his first name on the hottest new social app.
Full stop: What is Clubhouse?
It’s an invite-only app (for now) in which users can make rooms about topics they want to discuss. There can be several moderators in the room who can elect other moderators, bring guests on the stage to ask questions or speak, etc.
It’s essentially a timeline of rooms in which people are speaking about whatever topics they desire and you can poke your head in to listen or wait in line while raising your hand for an hour to get a vague answer.
I joined Clubhouse a couple of weeks ago and was fascinated with how much of a cesspool it is. Tons of people talking over people, people topic about topics that I legitimately would lose my job over mentioning, virtue-signaling competitions, and just straight up bizarre echo chambers of the highest order.
At first, I was naturally insanely critical and so was Twitter. Over the past couple of weeks, people started hating on Clubhouse and meme’ing it to death about how ridiculous the conversations and how people behaved were.
However, something kept drawing me in because of the simplicity of the app and actually how well functioning it was. When you found yourself in a good room it felt like everyone had walkie-talkies and taking turns telling their stories and such. Often times I would listen in rooms and find myself laughing out loud while working out or doing normal day-to-day activities. It became great background noise. Then overnight it seemed like the app grew and grew and grew…
Before you knew it EVERYONE is talking about Clubhouse and the user base has just exponentially skyrocketed. Since then, I have noticed the quality of rooms and discussions become more and more enlightening. Just the other day I was in an “E-Sports 101” room and listened for a solid hour and a half about the direction of the industry by E-Sports industry leaders, investors, and more. This proved very beneficial to me because I got to listen to top investors in the space talking about the direction of the industry that I personally invest in via $NERD $NVDA $AMD and others.
Then came the Moguls
Elon Musk came onto Clubhouse just over a week ago and practically broke the app. Everyone was listening in on multiple rooms (some had rooms streaming the Youtube live) and it was an incredible moment. Like I shared in my previous newsletter “Tesla & Bitcoin” Elon totally hinted at the fact that He/Tesla would be buying Bitcoin. Sure enough, a couple of days later Tesla put $1.5 Billion worth on their balance sheet. Fast forward a couple of days and Zuck himself is on the platform lurking about. And guess what comes next?
Zuck announces that Facebook will be working on their Clubhouse competitor. Shortly after Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter and Square) handed out “Spaces” to a select few users to try out with the community. I was lucky enough to be in a “Spaces” room on Twitter and worked just as well as Clubhouse. Interestingly enough you can share tweets at the top of the room on Spaces for people in the room to see. So the gold rush for audio room dominance begins.
Clubhouse Valuation
As a $FB shareholder the first question I asked myself was why doesn’t Zuck just buy out Clubhouse?
Not so easy and here’s why…
Clubhouse just announced their valuation is now $1 Billion as of 1/25/21 (source). That surely isn’t a problem for Facebook to handle, they got billions to spend. The problem lies in the fact that this is just the beginning for Clubhouse. I guarantee you with almost utmost certainty that Zuck and Jack have already tried to buy out Clubhouse and their offers were denied (for the time being). This $1 Billion valuation is largely based on normal users who have been invited using the peer-to-peer invite system. Celebs, Journalists, Companies, Radio Stations, Podcasts, etc. haven’t even begun to come aboard the Clubhouse train and when they do this valuation is going to skyrocket. Yeah, Zuck and Elon and a couple of others have come on the platform but trust me when I say this is just the tip of the iceberg. Every day you are going to see a new celeb or public figure tweeting out that they are holding a clubhouse meeting and tons of followers will flock to listen. I believe Clubhouse is denying buyout offers left and right. On top of this does Facebook need another monopoly case on their hands?
$FB vs. $TWTR
Twitter’s stock price has had an incredible 2020! Shareholders have to be happy that they are moving into new revenue streams. One for example is their buyout of Revue which is a Substack competitor. If you offer a paid newsletter through Revue the charge is only 5% vs. Substack’s 10%. My man Packy did an amazing deep dive newsletter talking about twitter’s current and future moves here: “How Twitter Got It’s Groove Back”.
Let’s look at a chart here from our friends at YCharts:
As you can see, on the 3-year chart that total return % has been just recently taken from $FB by $TWTR but $FB still has the revenue growth crown. I feel like $TWTR has a chance of being a revenue giant if they monetize their platform more via paid content for content creators, Revue newsletter revenue, and possibly optimizing Spaces in some sort of way. Either way, it is going to be interesting to how these three companies (Facebook, Twitter, and Clubhouse) will battle it out for audio room dominance.
What are your thoughts? Comment below.
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