For as long as we can remember it feels like Facebook has been on top of the world. They bought instagram in 2012 for a staggering $1 billion dollars. Overtime it seemed like Facebook was the king of the internet. Ad revenue reached a milestone $115 billion in 2021, which accounted for over 97% of Facebook’s total revenue. Then on June 9 2022 Facebook made the biggest decision yet when it changed its name from Facebook to META. They did this hopes of being king of the Metaverse. IT seems like since Facebook made that decision everyone has turned its back on Meta.
facebook >Meta
In 2021 and it seemed as tho crypto and the metaverse had the attention of the whole world. The meta verse was valued at $209.77 billion USD. While the crypto market peeked at $2.9 trillion USD in market cap in November of 2021. Let’s not forget about the NFT market that was also valued at $17 billion USD in 2021. Notable projects like BoredApe and crypto punks were on the top of the game. This pushed Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Meta to change the company’s name from Facebook to Meta. With the vision of taking the company into the future of the world.
Meta already had its VR headsets “Oculus” out since 2016 with the Oculus Rift headset. So obviously Mark has had his eyes set on the metaverse long before 2021. Which ultimately did nothing but give him more confirmation to go full on with his plans. September of 2020 the latest Oculus known as “Oculus quest 2” was released which was sold out for a long time as people were rushing to test out this new piece of technology.
Mark has spoken briefly about plans with his Oculus Quest 3 in an interview. It seems as tho he is fully invested as he mentioned testing things like eye tracking, facial expression tracking, better hand tracking, and even inducing more senses like gloves that allow you to touch and feel things in the headset. With all this why does it feel like META is now on the biggest decline it has ever been ?
The feedback
If you go back to October 21, 2021 when Mark announced the infamous name change with everything going on you would think it was the perfect idea at the perfect time right ? Well that’s not how the public responded, in fact twitter was flooded with memes about it. Now that the whole meta verse Is seeming like its getting less and less relevant, people have more and more reason to feel like the idea to go from Facebook to Meta is a utter failure and mistake.
In 2022 talks about the meta verse fell into a deep grave as the crypto market itself has plunged to levels that has everybody questioning its future and sustainability. The crypto market has lost 58% of its value in the second quarter of 2022, and crypto losses hit a whopping $670 million. Do you think it will bounce back ? Let us know in the comments at the end of this article !
Meta loses billions
In the first 3 months of 2022 META lost over $10 billion dollars on its meta verse investments. Once again it gave the people even more of a reason to make memes about his “failure”. It didn’t end there either; in Q2 META lost $2.8 billion on its meta verse investments. While also planning to raise the price of its Quest 2 headset from $299 to $399.
It seems that the meta verse is just not working out for Mark, but he strongly disagrees. He told his shareholders ahead of time that their Meta’s investments will lose money for up to 5 years and most of its projects won’t be ready until 10-15 years. They want to make metaverse products affordable for everyone. They also put a hiring freeze on its meta verse projects after they announced they wanted to hire 10,000 more workers to work on it. It’s clear that Mark has a long term plan for the meta verse in which he hasn’t fully revealed yet, either way he has a strong belief that it will be a successful project.
Facebook’s ad revenue decline
Ad revenue makes up over 90% of the revenue for META, and for the first time ever its ad revenue has declined which is scary. Q2 of 2022 ended Meta’s decade long constant growth of ad revenue. “… we seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business. It’s always hard to predict how deep or how long these cycles will be, but I’d say that the situation seems worse than it did a quarter ago.” says Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not as bad as it seems when you see that it’s only a 1% decline in revenue. But some believe it may be just the beginning of the downfall of Facebook. TikTok is becoming the king of social media at a very fast pace. Is it the end of the reign of Meta (Facebook) or is it the beginning of the next generation of reign ?
I strongly agree with the fact that this is a process that will take many years to be successful
thanks for replying !