On October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be renaming itself Meta. The company was attempting to revitalize itself after a year of bad news story after bad news story. Reports came out that Facebook's products were perhaps bad for society; Apple threatened to become more strict about the platform's privacy infringements; teens were turning to TikTok rather than Facebook or Instagram. The list went on and on.
Now, after a year as Meta, it seems like very little has changed. When Zuckerberg announced the new name, he made clear he didn't just want it to be a rebranding exercise. The CEO promised that the company would create a "metaverse," what he believed to be the future of virtual reality. One year later, that future still looks far away.
As CNN Business notes, Meta has spent billions of dollars on the metaverse, and it's still unclear if it will ever even get off the ground. While the company burns more and more cash, its financial standing looks less and less certain.
Meta's concrete moves into the virtual reality space, the Quest 2 and the Quest Pro VR headsets, are popular for VR accessories, but haven't caught fire outside of that market, CNN Business reports. Meanwhile, Horizon Worlds, the VR space created by Meta, remains under-utilized, even if some big names are getting involved.
This underwhelming news is compounded by the fact that it's unclear whether the general public even wants a metaverse. Stills and videos from Horizon Worlds get routinely clowned on, and people's definition of what the metaverse actually is remains murky.
Meta's problems are made even worse by a newcomer in the social media field, TikTok. CNN Business reports that Meta's business is contracting as a result of TikTok's massive gains in recent years. Just this week, Meta reported a quarterly drop in revenue, which is only the second time such a report has been made in Facebook history. Combine the TikTok phenomenon with less ad revenue and slower user growth, and the picture continues to get bleaker.
Gil Luria, a D.A. Davidson technology strategist, laid out the company's position in stark terms: "The business is not growing in 2022. There is expectation that it will grow going forward, but that expectation may prove to be optimistic."
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