Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is spending billions of dollars on Metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the company revealed that the company has spent more than 10 billion dollars in the process of Metaverse since the last year, i.e. 2021.
It includes the variety of products which includes Reality Labs division, which makes virtual reality goggles, smart glasses. These products are key to Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse, a next generation of the internet where people would share virtual worlds and experiences across different software and hardware platforms.
A few days ago, for the first time, Meta revealed the results of its hardware division. In the past, the company had not broken out those numbers because products like virtual reality headsets were a small part of its overall business, which is dependent on social networking and digital advertising.
Due to all this spending, it dragged down Meta’s quarterly profits, which fell by 8% to $10.3 billion in the three months ended in December as compared to a year earlier. It is to be noted that even the revenue rose by 20% to $33.7 billion over the same period.
“We are committed to bringing this long-term vision to life and we expect to increase our investments for the next several years,” the company wrote in its third-quarter earnings release.
Investing $10 billion in the metaverse is more than ten times the amount of money Facebook paid to purchase Instagram back in 2012.
One of the main reasons Zuckerberg is interested in the metaverse, after all, is that he imagines it can give him a way to connect directly with his customers without having to depend on Apple and Google’s phone duopoly. Google has been working on metaverse-related technology for years, and Apple has its own devices in the works.
Meta has blamed Apple for its financial losses as Apple’s changes to its mobile operating system, in which the iPhone maker made it more difficult last year for apps to track iPhone users’ digital habits. The move has affected social networking companies because it has given them less data to use for serving people targeted ads.
Due to this less data, company is bearing huge decline in the performance. “The metaverse is a long way from being profitable or filling the gap in ad revenue after Apple’s policy change,” said Raj Shah, a technology analyst for Publicis Sapient, a digital consultancy firm.
