Meta‘s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told CNBC that he hoped Meta to reach billions of people who spend hundreds of dollars each to express themselves or decorate their surroundings.
He said:
“We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall,”
Meta is able to provide a sense of being present and together, unlike the company’s other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, says Zuckerberg. Participants can make eye contact, which is difficult to achieve in video calls or voice chats.
All these tweaks come together to deliver a realistic experience of being present. According to Zuckerberg, enhancing these experiences and developing Meta to be even more immersive will be the company’s primary goal over the next ten years.
Zuckerberg is optimistic
Meta admitted to having financial difficulties earlier this month. The company’s CFO, David Wehner, explained that the expenses must be reduced to $87 billion and $92 billion this year. Meta’s expenses from 2021 were between $90 billion and $95 billion. The company said they’d be slowing down the hiring pace amongst other expense cuts to reduce expenses.
A few days after this announcement, public blockchain network host Difinity Foundation sued Meta for allegedly using Difinity’s logo. The Foundation said Meta’s use of its logo could bring harm to its reputation.
Despite these challenges, Zuckerberg is very optimistic about Meta’s growth. He noted that the metaverse industry is slowly emerging and that Meta is already doing well.
He said:
“I’ve been really happy with how that’s gone. It has exceeded my expectations. But I still think it’s going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there.
So that’s the north star. I think we will get there. But, you know, the other services that we run are at a somewhat larger scale already today.”
Action steps for the near future
Zuckerberg acknowledged that the company needs to release a stack of hardware and software to grow into a billion-dollar platform.
To do that, despite the company’s financial problems, Zuckerberg said Meta will soon make significant, long-term research investments. The research will focus on developing the necessary tools to help Meta grow.
The company is already taking specific steps toward their visions. On May 10, 2022, the company revealed its plans to launch a payment platform by filing trademark applications for ‘Meta Pay.’
