It’s the first day of the NFL Draft, one of the most exciting weekends of the year for teams struggling to stay relevant in the league. The NFL has teamed up with the invitation-only social media app Clubhouse to provide fans everywhere with all of the draft coverage they need on this new, audio-content platform.
Clubhouse is an audio-chat app that allows users to be “on stage” to be part of the conversation or remain in the “audience” to simply listen to the conversation. Users can search “clubs” based on their favorite topics, from NFTs and cryptocurrency to sports topics to your favorite kind of music – the possibilities are endless.
This deal with the NFL will include everything-draft themed rooms, with mock drafts up until the beginning of the night to discussing the player selections throughout the weekend.
The league said in a statement that “This collaboration will bring the global community of football fans, players, and league legends on Clubhouse closer than ever before.”
The setup of the app looks similar to a virtual panel, giving room hosts and their moderators the ability to control who can speak and when. This will allow fans to be invited to the “stage” to give their feedback on the draft picks in real time, something most fans have never experienced before.
This is the first sports partnership that Clubhouse has secured, something that their competing audio-only app Locker Room is solely focused on.
The NFL is constantly trying to commit to innovation. They are proving that by evolving with new apps that can reach their fans in a new way while also creating content across all platforms that’s easily accessible for all fans alike.
Clubhouse has grown dramatically since the apps original launch date in March 2020. Corporate CEOs like Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have all joined the platform. Other influential people that have had an impact on Clubhouse include rappers Drake and Snoop Dogg and actors Ashton Kutcher and Tiffany Haddish.
The app is completely free without any ads, although there are plans for the future for some clubs to require paid subscriptions to funnel income to Clubhouse’s creators.
Clubhouse provides a more humanizing approach to social media – where most platforms have posts and direct messages, Clubhouse is strictly audio and a profile picture. There are no back channels to the app, so the only way to communicate with one another is vocally, something many have missed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 2021 NFL Draft coverage is merely the beginning of different partnerships for Clubhouse, and locking in on a deal as big as the most prominent professional football league in the world sets the bar extremely high for the app’s future.
Audio is big–that’s why this NFL Clubhouse deal was worth writing about. And it’s why we invest in audio– with multiple podcasts including The SportsEpreneur Podcast, Entrepreneur Perspectives, and Content Matterz.
We also help you produce your podcast.
Image of Clubhouse App was provided by Marco Verch under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.