Paraqeet opens view into Clubhouse digital art community with hefty price tags
The latest social media darling — especially while everyone was stuck at home during the height of the pandemic — is Clubhouse, an audio-based network created in 2020 that features “rooms” of users talking and exploring various topics. Once an invitation-only platform with a 10 million-person waiting list, Clubhouse lost some of its exclusive cachet when it opened to anyone in July.
Although its rapid growth has stalled, in part due to competition and people meeting in person again, Clubhouse can reveal what the interests of the week are through a Paraqeet search. A recent search of its usage in the U.S. and other countries highlighted an active community of people involved with creating, discussing, buying and selling nonfungible tokens (NFTs), which are one-of-a-kind digital objects. Other popular content revolved around whether the Clubhouse app is worthwhile and promotions by everyone from singers to academics to join a room to hear them perform or chat about economics.
Clubhouse itself always appeared as the No. 1 Twitter influencer in the Paraqeet searches regardless of country, as it was promoting its new features.
Influencers in countries including the U.S., Germany, Great Britain and France kept Twitter hopping with events involving the NFT community. An NFT is a token that represents ownership of a unique item such as a work of art or a collectible. NFTs can have only one official owner at a time, and they are secured by blockchain. The current interest is in creating and selling digital art.
Community NFTs center on thematically linked images. For example, the community Pudgy Penguins consists of all digitally created penguin drawings, but each is unique.
Buying a community NFT confers benefits such as being able to change your Twitter profile photo to your NFT, as well as membership in a shared Discord server, yet another space for a like-minded community to chat.
There’s certainly money to be made in the field. Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, auctioned his NFT work “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” for more than $69 million. And it’s not just art: Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, sold the first tweet he posted as an NFT for more than $2.9 million. Even Nike holds a patent for blockchain-compatible sneakers called “CrpytoKicks.”
While the NFT crowd is making good use of Clubhouse, the Paraqeet search showed much lower-stakes tweets in America with debates over whether Clubhouse was still useful for promoting events and stoking debate. Users pondered what it could do to regain its authenticity and whether platforms such as Twitter’s Spaces were better.
Other popular tweets during the last month in the U.S. were invitations to a room rehashing the ending of the HBO series “Insecure,” an animation club-hosted conversation with some of the people behind the Netflix show “Karma’s World” and information about a medical mission in Haiti. Tweets in other countries regarding Clubhouse ran a gamut of interests from talk about electric vehicles to the crisis with the world’s largest real estate developer in China to the differences in Japanese elementary schools compared to 50 years ago.
Although Clubhouse’s growth has slowed — it peaked in February with 9.6 million downloads and dropped to 900,000 new downloads in April — it’s still growing. In June, it added another 5.8 million from India, where it was brand new.
Because Clubhouse is a medium in which users need to promote their discussions or wares on other platforms such as Twitter, a Paraqeet search can show what people are converging around and, depending on your needs, locate the right moment for your cause or product.