Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change of his company from Facebook to Meta one year ago on Friday, placing a significant wager on the metaverse.
The decision has cost his company billions of dollars, and the “metaverse entrepreneurs” who rushed to its virtual world to generate real-world money could be easily excused for freaking out.
While some don’t seem to care.
Aaron Sorrels, a 47-year-old professional comedian who launched a virtual comedy club in Meta’s leading metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds, last year, calls it “one of the best experiences of my life.”
According to Meta’s most recent quarterly earnings report, the company’s metaverse segment has already lost $9.4 billion this year. Even as investors’ concerns about the lack of progress grow, Zuckerberg said he anticipates those losses to keep accruing as he continues to expand out the metaverse.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Horizon Worlds has apparently failed to draw and keep users: It presently has fewer than 200,000 monthly active users, which is less than half its target of 500,000.
On Thursday, CNBC referred to Meta’s “shocking collapse,” in which the company dropped out of the top 20 American corporations based on valuation and saw three consecutive quarters of revenue decreases. (A request for response from CNBC Make It was not immediately reacted to by Meta.)
The excitement of innovators like Sorrels has not been dampened by those terrible numbers.
