The call, in full

This card is about Clubhouse, the live podcasting and broadcasting app: 10 million weekly users, a $4 billion valuation in 2021. I disagreed on the record. 1 April 2020: digital audio and podcasting off the charts by 2025. 29 March 2021: Clubhouse fades to black. Both landed.

Why did it collapse like a soufflé? Launched iPhone-only: millions of Android users locked out day 1. Everything was live: arrive late, you missed it; room ended, content gone. No replay, no on-demand, no library to come back to. Crazy for an audio platform.

It recorded your conversations while you could not record them: privacy and GDPR minefield. Not everybody is a born host: endless rooms, millions of voices, little signal. Then the pandemic ended, FOMO died, Big Tech copied social audio overnight.

Clubhouse failed. Podcasting did not. Joe Rogan pulls 80 million downloads and views a month, earns $82 million a year. Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO reaches 50 million monthly listeners, makes $45 million, independent. Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy averages 10 million listeners an episode, signed $125 million with SiriusXM.

Voice tech went mainstream. Dim the lights by talking to Alexa or Google Home, ask Siri for directions, next you talk to AI robots. No screens, just your voice.

My 2030 call: US podcasting triples, $8.4 billion in 2025 to over $25 billion by 2030. Video is the new engine: 2026, the first year people watch more than listen. Never confuse explosive adoption of a feature with a platform shift.