A little over a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced the change of name of his company, which would go from Facebook to Meta. The company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of virtual reality and the metaverse. good now Zuckerberg wonders if he made a mistake betting on the Metaverse.
Metaverse has been a trend, a term widely used by everyone that encompasses many things and is not defined by anything. We recently learned that the EU wasted 400,000 dollars on a party in the metaverse for 6 people. And the list of wasted money in a digital universe is enormous.
Zuckerberg finds out the hard way that the Metaverse doesn’t matter
Reality shows that virtual reality and the metaverse are two irrelevant things. All the more so in a very complicated global economic situation due to the invasion of Ukraine and trade tensions between China and the United States.
NPD Group, a research firm, released a rather devastating report. Indicates that in 2022 virtual reality glasses were sold in the United States for a value of 1,100 million dollars, 2% less than in 2021. To give us an idea, advertis ing on Facebook generates the same amount of revenue in about three days.
CSS Insight, another analytics company is even more difficult. In their report, they state that in 2022, only 9.6 million virtual reality devices were sold
These are data that do not show a good situation for Facebook, now called Meta. The company lost about 60% of its value, only this year. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg says the commitment to the Metaverse is ten years away, which will be when it becomes something big. Until that moment arrives, the company is already planning to lay off almost 20% of its workforce in Europe, to begin with.
Dark times for all (or almost)
The reality is that Zuckerberg’s gamble only made the situation worse for the company. Its original social network, Facebook, is increasingly scattered and irrelevant to users. Instagram is holding up for the moment, because it is already in itself a metaverse of light and color, of utter unreality. WhatsApp implements some paid features, more for business and not for general user.
But it’s not the only tech company with big problems. Twitter has been in the process of total destruction since Elon Musk joined the company. We have seen how Twitch has lost users and at the same time advertising has increased tremendously.
Currently, only YouTube and TikTok are spared from serious problems. The truth is that YouTube is more than consolidated and has almost nothing to do to sustain itself. TikTok, for its part, is a brand new social network that knows how long it will last.
