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Social audio apps have faced constraints and significant declines since the pandemic in 2020.

Clubhouse, a social audio app that has become a phenomenon in the pandemic era, has seen a significant drop in registrations since its peak level two years ago.

According to a Similarweb analysis provided to TheWrap, the monthly downloads of social audio platforms have dropped by 86% since the release of Clubhouse’s Android app last summer, and now average around 2.8 million downloads worldwide. I am. After the surge in adoption early in the 2020 pandemic, the platform faced some constraints as it sought to expand the platform amid intensifying competition.

“This is this new and imaginative concept for live audio chat rooms, and the appeal of invitations made it even more appealing,” Sneha Pandy, Insight Manager at Similarweb, told The Wrap. “Invitations were so rare that some people sold them on eBay. It was really boosted by the need for pandemics and social and virtual interactions.”

Clubhouse does not provide user data, but it is available for chat room attendance, suggesting the limits of the platform. The company promoted chats with celebrities such as Elon Musk and Tiffany Haddish, but only about 15,000 to 18,000 users attended these sessions. The Adele and Oprah Winfrey live rooms gained only about 40,000 listeners last November. This is just a small percentage of the 10 million people who attended Adele’s special performance at CBS at the same time.

According to Crunchbase, a two-year-old San Francisco-based startup that took advantage of its pandemic launch raised a total of $ 110 million following the June 2021 Series C round. With an investment led by venture company Andreessen Horowitz, the company has been touted as Silicon Valley’s most popular new app.

Some of the initial features, such as invitation-only and restricting attendance per chat room, have actually worked for the app over time. The Clubhouse app also didn’t debut on Android devices until a year after Apple was released in 2020. Since the release of Android, app downloads peaked in July 2021. However, in August, the number of registrations decreased by 45% from the previous month and continued. drop down.

The app recorded the best month of global downloads in early 2021. In February of that year, the number of installations reached 9.6 million. However, the number of registrants worldwide has fallen below 2 million in recent months. According to Sensor Tower, global installations plummeted to 962,000 in October.

Clubhouse representatives said the Sensor Tower download quotes offered by last year were lower than what the company sees internally, but refused to provide their own recent metrics. ..

Neither Sensor Tower nor Similarweb were able to share the latest iOS data, but analysts say the downtrend for iPhone apps this year is similar. According to Statista, Android users account for about 46% of the US mobile market share.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that Apple looks the same in the United States,” Pandy said.

Pandey added that the app would lose viewers who couldn’t watch live because the Clubhouse live chat wasn’t recorded before. In addition, there is a correlation between the deployment of the COVID-19 vaccine and the slowdown in traffic on many platforms that have surged over the last two years.

Clubhouse’s growth has also been challenged by major platforms that quickly copy live audio capabilities, as the service did not have its own features. The Facebook, Twitter and Spotify user bases are already quite large.

“People were hungry for connections, but they didn’t always want to jump into video chat,” Shama Hyder, CEO of digital marketing firm ZenMedia, told The Wrap earlier. “Everywhere there is a community, there is income. The challenge is that clubhouses are not the only place to have a community.”

The decline in sign-ups is dramatic, but Pandy believes the Clubhouse isn’t completely dead. It has received a lot of attention by making social audio more mainstream. This can be comparable to the course of many apps that initially grow rapidly. Eventually it will be in recession.