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When Dan lost his job due to COVID-19, he found an unlikely income stream: selling invites to a new social media platform.

The app is called Clubhouse and looks very different to Instagram or TikTok or Twitter, with their bright feeds of videos and photos and pithy wordplay.

Clubhouse is slower and stranger. It's audio-only; no photos to be seen, except those on user profiles.

Using Clubhouse is like listening to a podcast, but live. Or like being part of a very exclusive conference, one with celebrities.

The conversations cannot be recorded within the app, which seems to loosen people up and encourage them to speak more freely.

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If you aren't in the room to hear them talk, you'll miss out forever.

And to get in the room, you have to get on the app, which is invitation only.

Most members have only been given a handful of invites to share, but Dan was among the first to sign up to the app. He had heaps. Fresh out of work, he saw a chance to make an easy buck.

For the past three months, he's been selling up to 80 invites a day, mostly through Reddit.

"Demand has been massive," he told the ABC via email from the United States.

"I joined Clubhouse very early so I have unlimited invites."

At $US30 a pop, he's made $54,000.

For a measure of the buzz around Clubhouse, Dan's $54,000 is a good place to start.

Launched in April last year, Clubhouse is being spruiked as "the next big thing" in social media.

It's currently riding a wave of media hype, celebrity endorsements, venture capital and chart-topping download figures. The number of active weekly users has increased more than 1,500 per cent to 10 million in the past few months.

But probably the most obvious sign of Clubhouse's success is the fact Instagram and Twitter are launching their own clone versions similar to the way Instagram brought out Reels last year to take on TikTok's popularity in short-form video.

Supplied: Clubhouse

Clubhouse has been described as a cross between a conference call, talkback radio and the video-chat platform Houseparty.

Others call it a hybrid of Twitter and TED Talks.

Once you've logged in, you're brought to the "hallway", a collection of different chat rooms with their topics and list of speakers/listeners on display.

The "conversation rooms" off this "hallway" look much the same as an audio-only conference call. Unlike most calls, however, not everyone gets to speak.

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Generally, there are many more people listening than have been given access to the mic. Each conversation room can fit up to 5,000.

After the conversation is over, the room is closed. There's no recording through the app (though some users find ways around this).

And that's Clubhouse. The platform is pretty basic, but users appear to like it.

Some go to the platform for a sneak preview of an upcoming musical (The Lion King did this in November), or to hop into a room with a favourite celebrity.

Others are chasing fame and exposure. Many of the rooms are dedicated to making money from tech, including by investing in cryptocurrency schemes or non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Think of it as a vast and sprawling, never-ending conference with no particular focus.

Topics can range from the frivolous to the serious.

Last month the Chinese government banned the app after thousands shared stories of "re-education camps" and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

According to Crystal Abidin, a digital anthropologist at Curtin University, Clubhouse's popularity is a product of the pandemic.

In an age of working from home, where furniture outlets are selling fake bookshelves to make people look good on Zoom calls, audio-only is a relief.

And at a time when social events are easily accessible online, through platforms like Facebook or Eventbrite, talks on Clubhouse are harder to access, and therefore offer the excitement of attending something exclusive.

"Clubhouse came about and said, 'Hey, this is audio only. No need for video we're only going to hear your voice,'" Dr Abidin said.

"It feels like Clubhouse is taking away from all that Zoom fatigue."

The fact the spoken conversations cannot be easily recorded or archived adds to this sense of exclusivity.

"You tune in now or you tune in never," Dr Abidin said.

Clubhouse essentially trades on FOMO the fear of missing out.

"Right now, it's like a gentlemen's club or an insider's club that only people who are very invested in would seek out," Dr Abidin said.

Guilherme, a Portugal-based Clubhouse invite seller on Reddit, said he believed most of his customers (paying about $US15 per invite) were wannabe tech entrepreneurs.

The app can sometimes feel like a version of TV shows like Dragon's Den or Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs make business presentations to a panel of wealthy investors who decide whether to invest in their company.

"It's new and people don't want to miss the hype train," Guilherme said.

"Eighty per cent of rooms are entrepreneurs who tell their stories about how to make money."

If Guilherme is right, there's a strange circularity to the fact that people who lost their jobs due to COVID are making a buck selling invites to wealth seminars.

One of the Reddit sellers told the ABC: "I lost my part-time job as a bartender. I am a college student from middle Europe."

Another said: "I'm not really making much, but money is money."

Of course, staying exclusive while being popular will not be easy.

As downloads soar, the influx of new members could gradually dilute the qualities that made the app popular in the first place, Dr Abidin said.

"Now everyone and their parents are on Clubhouse."

For most of last year, the app kept a relatively low profile a preserve of the Silicon Valley elite.

This changed on January 31, 2021, when Elon Musk interviewed the chief executive officer of Robinhood on Clubhouse at the height of the GameStop saga, grilling him on why his company had stopped some share trades. The 5,000-person conversation room filled up. One user streamed it to YouTube, where the video has been watched millions of times.

Getty Images: Britta Pedersen

Guilherme, the invite seller, noticed the Musk interview coincided with an increase in demand for Clubhouse invites.

"That was the real boom," he said.

Other sellers report selling as many invites as they could supply.

For what it's worth, Dan the invite mogul says demand has slowed in the past week.

He's only sold 20 invites a day, down from 80.

"That could be for a lot of reasons. Like Bitcoin, Clubhouse runs hot and cold," he said.

According to data from the analytics company Sensor Tower, Clubhouse downloads are still going strong. It's the eighth-ranked free social networking app on Apple's app store, down from a peak of third, but still high.

In Australia, Clubhouse is ranked ninth.

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But the app stores are littered with apps that do well at first and then ultimately fail to break into the mainstream.

MeWe, for example, was spruiked in the mid-noughties as an alternative to Facebook. It failed at that, but survived by retaining a core group of users (generally people from the far right who believe in conspiracy theories).

Perhaps once the COVID lockdowns lift in different parts of the world and people are spending less time online, Clubhouse will become more of a niche professional platform something like an audio-only version of LinkedIn.

Another scenario is sex work: audio-only conversations are harder to moderate than text-based ones, which can be more easily ready by machines.

"Deep down, I feel like at some point this is just going to be used for the online exchange of sexual services," Dr Abidin said.

"Sex has been deplatformed from so many apps of late and these groups of workers just need a place to go. This could be a really good space for that to happen.

"We'll see if that ever comes here."

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Originally posted here:
What is Clubhouse? The invite-only social media platform that people are paying to join - ABC News