Clubhouse has another partnership, and this time, it’s with one of the most popular podcast networks. The company announced today that it’s partnering with TED to bring exclusive chats to the social audio platform throughout the summer and beyond. The first room, called Thank Your Ass Off, will start July 12th and run weekly at 11AM ET on Mondays. The company says additional rooms will launch soon, all going through TED’s Clubhouse club.
Under the deal, TED is free to sell brand partnerships or ads, if it’s interested, and Clubhouse won’t take a cut, a spokesperson confirms. The partnership makes sense given that people often compare Clubhouse rooms to TED talks, essentially meaning people wax on about big ideas and often do so in the style of a conference presentation. The company is also already a major success in audio through its podcasting efforts, so it’s possible a form of these chats might be distributed outside the app as an RSS feed.
TED launched its Audio Collective in February this year, and at the time, said its shows were downloaded 1.65 million times per day in “virtually every country on Earth.” Spotify also says TED Talks Daily was the second most popular show globally on its platform in 2020. All of which is to say, TED knows how to do audio, people like listening to its programming, and Clubhouse can benefit from that buzz. On TED’s end, it can host regular Q&As and integrate audience interaction, which it can’t do through the usual podcast recording means.
Increasingly, it seems like the winners in social audio might come down to whoever can lock down talent. Presumably, Spotify will encourage its podcasters to use Greenroom, its Clubhouse competitor, while Facebook has planned to work with Bobby Berk, Tina Knowles-Lawson, and Joe Budden, among others, for its Live Audio Rooms.
Already, at least one other potential Clubhouse partnership might have been lost to Twitter Spaces. Twitter and the NFL announced this past week that they’d be exclusive partners on live audio chats for the upcoming football season. Clubhouse had previously hosted exclusive NFL chats during Draft Week.
