Clubhouse Social Media App: What It Is and Whether It Still Matters

The Clubhouse social media app launched in 2020 as an invite-only audio platform and briefly became the most talked-about app on the internet. Venture capital poured in, the waiting list ran into millions, and executives from Silicon Valley to Belfast were hosting live audio rooms. Then the hype collapsed almost as fast as it arrived.

What most articles miss is that Clubhouse didn’t die. It pivoted. The app underwent a significant redesign in 2023, shifting from live audio rooms to asynchronous voice messaging through a feature called Chats. Understanding what Clubhouse looks like today, rather than in 2021, is the only way to assess whether it has any practical value for your business or social media strategy.

What Is the Clubhouse App?

Clubhouse is a social audio platform where users communicate through voice, either in live group rooms or through asynchronous voice messages. It launched in March 2020, founded by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, and was initially available by invitation only on iOS.

At its peak in early 2021, the app had more than 10 million registered users and a reported valuation of $4 billion. High-profile names, including Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Mark Zuckerberg, participated in live rooms, which drove a media frenzy that inflated expectations beyond what any audio platform could realistically sustain.

The invite-only model ended in July 2021 when the app opened to the public. Android support launched in May 2021. By that point, Twitter Spaces, Spotify Greenroom, and LinkedIn Audio had all launched competing products, and Clubhouse’s unique selling point had largely evaporated.

The 2023 Pivot: From Live Rooms to Chats

This is the section most competitor articles skip entirely, which is why they fail to accurately describe what Clubhouse actually is today.

In 2023, Clubhouse introduced “Chats” as its primary feature. Chats function like voice-based group messaging threads, similar to a WhatsApp group but built around short audio messages rather than text. Users record a voice note, send it to a group, and others reply in their own time. The conversation accumulates as an audio thread rather than disappearing the moment a live room closes.

The reasoning from the founders was direct: live rooms required scheduling, commitment, and real-time availability. Most users weren’t willing to carve out an hour to attend a room that might start late, run long, or cover topics only loosely related to their interests. Chats removed that friction. You contribute when you have something to say.

Live rooms still exist on Clubhouse, but they’re now secondary to the Chats experience. The app’s interface reflects this shift, with Chats given more prominent placement than the room discovery hallway that defined the original product.

How Chats Work vs. Live Rooms

In a Chat, participants send voice messages of up to 60 seconds. Messages persist in the thread, so anyone joining later can listen from the beginning. Rooms, by contrast, are synchronous: you either attend live or you miss it (unless the host enables a replay).

For business users, Chats are more practical than live rooms for most purposes. A group of marketing professionals can maintain a running audio conversation about industry news without coordinating schedules. The drawback is that Chats lack the energy and spontaneity of a well-run live room, and discovery is limited to people you already follow or who are members of the same House.

Is Clubhouse Still Active? Key Statistics

Clubhouse does not publish monthly active user figures, which itself says something about where the platform stands. Third-party data from Business of Apps estimated around 10 million monthly active users in early 2024, down from an estimated 50 million in early 2021. Downloads have stabilised rather than continued declining, suggesting the app has found a smaller but more committed audience.

The app store ratings are reasonable: 4.5 on iOS, 3.8 on Android as of early 2024. Revenue remains minimal; Clubhouse has not successfully monetised beyond a small creator payment programme.

For context, X (formerly Twitter) Spaces is now the dominant audio social feature, partly because it requires no separate app and reaches Twitter’s existing user base directly. Discord has absorbed much of the community audio use case, particularly for gaming and niche interest groups. Clubhouse’s remaining active community tends to be concentrated in professional development, entrepreneurship, wellness, and religion-based conversations.

How to Use Clubhouse Today

Setting up an account takes under five minutes. Download the app from the App Store or Google Play, register with a phone number, and create a profile with a photo and bio. There is no invitation required.

Your profile bio is plain text with no hyperlinks or formatting, so write it as a concise professional summary. Because Clubhouse rooms show your photo and name rather than a full profile preview, a clear headshot matters more than it might on LinkedIn.

Once inside, the main interface shows a feed of active rooms and Chats from people you follow or Clubs you have joined. The “Hallway” surfaces rooms and conversations based on your interests and connections. You can join any open room as a listener, raise your hand to request speaking access, or start your own room.

Houses (previously called Clubs) are the community layer. These are groups organised around a shared topic or professional identity. Joining a relevant House is the fastest way to find conversations worth contributing to.

Clubhouse vs. X Spaces vs. Discord

For most UK businesses, X Spaces is easier to use for audience reach because it operates within an existing platform. Clubhouse has a more focused, quieter community, which can work in favour of longer professional conversations where you want an engaged rather than a large audience.

Clubhouse in the UK: Is There Still a Local Community?

The UK Clubhouse community is smaller than its US counterpart, but active pockets exist, particularly around entrepreneurship, tech, and personal development. Rooms focused on Northern Ireland and Irish business have appeared periodically, though scheduling consistency is an issue.

For Belfast-based businesses and agencies like ProfileTree, Clubhouse is less immediately valuable than LinkedIn or podcast-based outreach for reaching local SME decision-makers. The audience demographic skews toward early adopters and professionals interested in voice-first content, which is a real but narrow segment of the market.

Where Clubhouse holds genuine value for UK businesses is in cross-border professional networking. The platform removes the formality barrier of LinkedIn messaging and the attention competition of Instagram. A well-run room on a specific business topic can attract participants from across the UK and Ireland who would never connect on other platforms.

If you’re assessing Clubhouse as part of a broader social media strategy, the question isn’t whether the platform is growing; it clearly isn’t at the scale it once was, but whether your target audience is there in sufficient numbers and whether the format suits what you’re trying to communicate.

As Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree, points out: “The businesses that get value from audio-first platforms are usually the ones with a genuine point of view and the willingness to speak rather than publish. Clubhouse rewards conversationalists, not broadcasters.”

Clubhouse for Business: Practical Applications

Audio-first social content is a legitimate format for specific business goals. Clubhouse works best when the objective is one of the following:

Thought leadership. Hosting a regular room on a specialist topic builds credibility with a self-selected audience. A Belfast-based accountancy firm running a monthly Clubhouse room on business tax planning for SMEs would attract exactly the audience that wants that expertise.

Community building. Houses allow businesses to create persistent communities around their area of expertise. This functions similarly to a private LinkedIn group but with a lower barrier to contribution, because speaking is faster and less effortful than writing a considered post.

Research and listening. Joining rooms run by your target audience is a direct window into the language, concerns, and priorities of potential clients. This kind of qualitative listening is difficult to replicate from analytics alone.

For ProfileTree clients building out their digital marketing strategy, audio content is one component of a content mix that typically includes SEO-optimised blog content, video, and social media management. Clubhouse works best when integrated into a broader plan rather than treated as a standalone channel.

Privacy and Safety

Clubhouse has addressed the data concerns raised during its 2021 data scraping incident, when a developer extracted and published user data from the platform’s API. The company introduced tighter API restrictions and updated its privacy policy following that incident.

Live rooms can be recorded only by the moderator, and only with participants’ awareness. Chats are persistent by design, so treat them as you would any written record. The app does not sell advertising and generates no revenue from targeting user data, which removes one common privacy concern that applies to Facebook or TikTok.

Is Clubhouse Still Relevant?

Clubhouse is not the platform it was in 2021, and any article that treats it as such is working from outdated information. It has shed the mass-market ambitions of its peak period and settled into a smaller, more defined role as an audio community platform with a genuine async voice messaging feature that none of its major competitors currently offer.

For businesses asking whether to invest time in Clubhouse, the honest answer depends on your audience and your capacity. If your target clients are early-adopter professionals interested in audio-first content, a modest presence on Clubhouse costs little beyond time and can generate meaningful professional relationships. If you’re a retailer, a hospitality business, or any brand whose customers are on Instagram and TikTok, Clubhouse is not where your effort should go.

The platform found its niche. Whether that niche is relevant to your business is a question worth a few hours of listening before committing.

FAQs

Got questions about the Clubhouse social media app? Here are the answers businesses and marketers ask most.