Clubhouse Announces Tipping

Yesterday, Clubhouse announced in-app payment tipping for creators. The move is a long time coming but it is finally here. The TLDR is below:

• 100% of the payment will go to the creator. Person sending the money will be charged a small processing fee.

• Partnering with Stripe on the processing fee. Clubhouse takes nothing.

When you want to pay a creator, you can click on the profile and at the bottom, you’ll see the Send Money button and from there you can send $5, $10, $20 or a custom amount to the creator.

The feature is being rolled out to a few users at first as a beta with the intent of rolling it out to the broader user base in the future.

Tipping on An Audio-Only Platform

So, that’s how creator tipping will work on the massively popular app, Clubhouse. But that begs the question, who is going to be giving people tips in the first place and why?

Well, if you haven’t tuned into clubhouse rooms, download it (iPhone only for now) and listen into the variety of rooms on the platforms.

Talk Shows

There are large talk show rooms like The Good Time Show by husband-wife power couple Sriram Krishnan & Aarthi Ramamurthy featuring big guests like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and a whole Motley Crue of recurring guests like Garry Tan, Steven Sinofsky and more. The show is multiple times a week with fascinating tech related talkshow guests including The Chainsmokers, Calvin Harris, film & music video director Emil Nava and many more. The room routinely draws between 2K-5K+ attendees at its time of 10PM PST and lasts for about an hour. The main reason this is a talk show is because there is no Q&A, the conversation flows naturally just as if you had the Avengers being interviewed by Jimmy Fallon The Tonight Show. The only difference is that this is audio only and Sriram & Aarthi are the hosts who weave between topics and keep the vibe informative, curiosity-driven and light-hearted. They do ask some important questions but the idea with any of these people from Zuckerberg to MetaKovan (the guy who spent $69M dollars on NFT art) is to learn their decision calculus not ask “gotcha” questions that equate to veiled journalism for snippets and clickbait.

Another widely popular show/room is Press Club with Josh Constine. Josh is an ex-journalist who worked at TechCrunch and was often the face of the company interviewing companies on latest products & tech news at many conferences.

He has an innate ability to weave concepts together, give riveting summaries and keep things fast paced, interesting and on time. That last bit of “on time” is insanely difficult when you have speakers who ramble or give long tangentially related answers especially when you’re talking with some of the biggest people in the world.

Josh and team have built Press Club into a whole operation complete with recording the episodes on Clubhouse and uploading to his own site: constine.club.

Furthermore, Josh has combined his rooms with some artists for digital live art. After a particularly big room where he was talking to three CEOs, he had an artist who made an NFT of the event and directed traffic directly to Foundation where the art piece was being bid on.

The access to shows like this are typically guarded behind a keynote registration fee or a paywall for a virtual conference in COVID. With Clubhouse, it costs nothing to listen, just your time.

So, if people like the guests and the conversation, this could easily be a room that is tipped where tips would be sent directly to Aarthi & Sriram or Josh in the room.

Interactive Shows

There are many more types of shows that make sense for tipping but another one is interactive shows where audience members have the opportunity to interact with the people on stage. Think podcast but you can interact with the hosts and almost gamify the experience. One of the best shows on Clubhouse is NYU Girls Roast Tech Bros. Their show is on Tuesdays/Thursdays at 7PM PST.

I’ll be writing a separate article about this gal group and their road to a fantastic recurring clubhouse room in a separate article but for those that don’t know, here’s the TLDR.

TLDR

The group started as a group of friends as a joke and very quickly became a “Shoot your shot” type of room. What that means is that audience members can raise their hand to be invited to stage and then talk directly to one of the moderators or ask someone from the audience to be invited up and then talk to them directly.

The room works for three main reasons:

1. The hosts aka the mods are hilarious and give no leash to tech guys who can’t pitch themselves in 15-20 seconds or less.

2. It’s fast paced and chaotic good. It’s funny to describe a room as chaotic good but when someone lands a shot, things move fast in room as the conversation between the two people is now meant to be off app.

3. The chemistry and banter and hosts vibe off each other very well while keeping people entertained. If you think about late night, there’s music, there’s small segments and its’ a whole production.

For the NYU girls, they have built out a full production for a minute fraction of the cost. The site https://shotson.club/ serves as a secondary character complete with a live chat with interactive polls for people in the room to have fun while being in the clubhouse room audience. Similar to how professors used to try to have audience participation by enforcing the clicker rule on their students, this is the modern day version of keeping the audience entertained while they are sitting back and enjoying the show.

The Bottom Line

Tipping is a model that is ages old. From tipping a waiter or waitress for great customer service to built-in tips on delivery apps, the concept has been around for decades. However, the majority of that tip money wouldn’t go to the original person.

For example, tipping at a restaurant sometimes goes directly to the person but if you’ve seen any TV show or movie in the last few years, you’d know there’s some percentage skimmed off the top. That is exacerbated for delivery apps. A percentage of the tip goes to the delivery driver not the whole tip. In fact, the platform is typically the one pocketing some of the change on the transaction.

This is why Clubhouse introducing tips is different. They get nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Creator-first means creators get paid for what they do. Period. And the way they’ve rolled this out is exactly that. The creator(s) are the ones who create the experience, bring the audience, keep them entertained and thus get 100% of the payment. Instead the person sending the money gets charged a small processing fee thru Stripe.

It’s an almost digital return to the artform of busking. You know busking where some guy or girl would break out their guitar at a subway station and sing to the public. People would throw pennies and quarters or dollars into the guitar case to support the struggling artist. In that situation, there is no processing fee, but you know that 100% of what you give is going to that one person. Your dollar is theirs. There’s no middleman taking a cut.

That said, only time will tell how this feature gets rolled out and which creators continue to thrive on Clubhouse by making great audio-only experiences.

It’s an ever-changing world and we’re just living in it.

Announcements

Couple of quick announcements if you got this far.

I’m re-upping this newsletter after taking most of March off to focus on work. Here’s the new schedule:

Wednesdays - Mid Week Roundups of the latest in the Creator Economy, sometimes singular dives like this, others more broad across the creator industry.

Sundays - deep dives into one single creator as before.

If you enjoyed this edition and want more outside of this article, follow me on Twitter @CreatorsDigest.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe for the latest articles!

See you on Sunday!