The best part about Clubhouse and social audio is that you don’t have to do all the work of being on video or writing out a blog post.

While it may sound fun to be a professional writer or YouTuber, it’s a lot of work.

Pre-show research and post production alone take exponentially more time to produce than the actual finished product to consume.

Check out the first Clubhouse book here.

But, it’s hard to deny that YouTube and video discoverability are more valuable than any Clubhouse room can be. The company that doesn’t understand how to monetize and imposed a technical limitation.

Here’s the views on just one of the Clubhouse videos on my YouTube channel, of 6ix9ine fighting with the platform’s in-house gangsters.

It has nearly 100,000 views and earned about $100.00.

Now because the video itself was filled with expletives, it received at the low end – typically, a YouTuber earns closer to $4 per 1k views.

But when have you ever been in a Clubhouse room with 1k people?

The rare few creators who build such rooms are the only ones who would earn $4 in sponsorship money. Everyone else would need cryptocurrency to pay the fractions of a penny they would earn. And that’s assuming there are banner and video ads running on their content, neither of which Clubhouse provides.

Now a big creator like Kat Cole could continuously grind for her $4 a room, but she gets no residual money from that. My YouTube video (which is basically just a stale image of a Clubhouse room with audio) got 100x the views Cole gets.

A single Clubhouse room has a maximum capacity under 10,000 people. Her income cap is 10 percent of what I earned on YouTube.

The $100 I earned from my Clubhouse room YouTube video is a ripoff for YouTubers because it had profanity. But it’s exponentially more than Cole can earn on Clubhouse, and it’s infinitesimally more than the $0 6ix9ine and everyone else in the room with him made.

And no brand wants to give sponsorship to an individual creator with the numbers they’re pulling. Clubhouse should’ve just placed a banner ad in the hallway and split gross income with Creators.

That the company (which includes executive staff pulled from Spotify, Sirius, TEDx, and others) still hasn’t figured out basic app monetization is mind-boggling. They’ve had two years on this app alone to figure it out, let alone the handful of failed apps each of them released leading into Clubhouse.

So I started thinking – how do I make YouTube money with Clubhouse efforts?

Clubhouse Convos official vtube avatar

Meet River, my animated avatar. It’s a 2D animation project. The initial drawing was done in Adobe Photoshop (GIMP works too) with different layers for the mouth, eyes, eyebrows, head, and body. From there, the files are loaded into VTube Studio (Animaze, formerly FaceRig, works well too).

Once you have everything set up right, you need to start creating different emotions and facial features. It’s a time consuming process, and I so far only have happy, sad, and angry done. The eyebrows, eyes, and mouth all adapt to those expressions on my face.

I’m using a Logitech Brio Ultra HD webcam and have a cheap LED ring light from Amazon to ensure it gets enough detail. It’s still having a bit of trouble tracking my face fully, but I was wearing glasses and am impressed with its ability to track my pupils and blinking through that.

There’s still a lot of work to do with the mouth, and I have two more characters coming down the line for my overall web presence.

However, it’s worth all the up-front effort to rig something that combines the effortless nature of streaming on Clubhouse with the increased revenue possibilities provided by YouTube.

And I’m not stopping there – thanks to Streamlabs Prime, I also have access to livestream across Twitch, Facebook, and LinkedIn. These means I can seamlessly integrate professional-looking content without having to show my face on camera anymore.

Have some refinements to make and a lot more backend work to do, along with more animated characters and backgrounds. But be on the lookout for fresh rebrandings of Clubhouse Convos and my other web properties coming soon.