- Meta remains committed to its Metaverse vision despite losing billions in 2022.
- Meta is yet to give up on Metaverse even though the social media giant has developed an interest in artificial intelligence.
- Mark Zuckerberg’s interest in Metaverse is a long-term vision.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has reaffirmed the company’s interest in Metaverse. The interest of Meta—formerly Facebook— in the Metaverse, has resulted in costing the prominent social media company a loss of $20 billion since 2021.
Despite the epic failure of Meta’s side project, Mark Zuckerberg said the company remains committed to the Metaverse vision.
“Our investments in AI continue. We remain fully committed to the Metaverse vision as well. We’ve been working on both of these two major priorities for many years in parallel now, and in many ways, the two areas are overlapping and complementary,” Mark said.
In the company’s earnings report in February, Reality Labs, the division handling Meta’s Metaverse project, made its biggest loss since its financial information was made public.
Facebook was rebranded to Meta in 2021, which signified the beginning of the company’s interest in the Metaverse. After its rebrand, Meta was committed to creating an interconnected Metaverse, which Zuckerberg refers to as an “open and interoperable” Metaverse.
In light of the financial loss and failure of Reality Labs in its Metaverse vision, Zuckerberg continues to show a solid front by reaffirming his interest in the Metaverse.
“I have not seen any indications that we should change our Reality Labs strategy in the long term,” He stated.
Mark Zuckerberg explained that his vision of the Metaverse is long-term.
“This is an ambitious long-term horizon, multi-faceted roadmap. There are lots of components to the Reality Labs portfolio across VR, AR, Metaverse, social platforms, neural interfaces, and we really have a long-term time horizon for evaluating the return on our investments here,” He explained.
“I can’t guarantee you that I’m going to be right about this bet. I do think that this is the direction that the world is going in.”
The Chief Financial Officer of Meta, Susan Li, explained the financial loss as expenses from Reality Labs and growth in employee-related costs.
While Meta’s interest in AI and the Metaverse has caused a financial decline in the company’s finances, there has been an increase of 5% and 7% in daily active users on Facebook and Instagram, respectively.
Meta’s stocks closed 1% higher on Wednesday and increased by 6.89% after trading hours.
Another Meta project that seemed to have hit a wall is Threads. Threads is a social media app developed and launched by Meta. The application was widely regarded as a Twitter rival due to the timing of the app launch.
Elon Musk’s micromanaging of Twitter led to the search for an alternative social media application. Seizing the moment, Threads launched successfully, and for the first few days, millions of users abandoned Twitter for Threads.
Unfortunately, Threads was not the “Twitter killer” users hoped for. Three weeks since its memorable launch, Threads has experienced a 60% drop in active users.
