Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg insists that his company’s Metaverse is the future, but can it deliver on that dream?
Would the Metaverse deliver tangible benefits to its users and to Meta as compared to current social media? It is hardly a unique question. Most people I have seen discussing Meta’s Metaverse push concentrate on the user experience, highlighting how the headsets are often prohibitively expensive and how bad the graphics are. I’ve discussed the Metaverse on the blog before, first laying out my argument for why I don’t think the Metaverse will catch on, and then arguing that a successful Metaverse could result in total corporate control over social spaces to the detriment of society. This time I want to discuss the Metaverse from a corporate perspective and ask the following question: does the Metaverse make business sense?
Meta is a social media firm and the Metaverse is more of an evolution than a revolution for Meta as a business, even if its promises of revolutionising life come through. Most social media platforms (and many other internet firms) are ultimately producing user data which is sold to advertisers for advertisers to have a better chance at selling their products; so Meta’s business model is essentially producing an input good for the advertising industry. The idea is that the Metaverse will allow Meta to collect more and higher quality user data which will make it more attractive to advertisers. But does collecting user data from a virtual reality environment really produce more and better data? I speculate that the type of data which is useful to advertisers, like knowing that a person is looking to buy a new phone, is less likely to be found in the Metaverse than on the old internet. The value added by seeing a 3d render of a product rather than a 2d picture depends entirely on the product, and for big purchases I’m not sure Facebook ads will be the deciding factor. I also wonder whether the Metaverse will actually result in a larger amount of data as the VR headsets it requires makes it more of a time investment to get into the Metaverse compared to browsing on your phone. You might go on Facebook on your commute to work or while you’re on an exercise bike, but you probably wouldn’t go into the Metaverse in those situations. Therefore I think that the Metaverse fails to deliver both better and more user data, and will thus not be a good investment from Meta’s perspective.
To be clear I think that is a good thing. In the two aforementioned blog posts I wrote about the Metaverse earlier this year the main point was that I dislike the concept, so the fact that I assess the Metaverse to have a difficult time becoming the dominant user data collection tool is good for the users. I wrote in the first post that Silicon Valley tends to view history as a linear march of progress where new technologies replace old ones. And the Metaverse seems like a perfect symbol for that way of thinking. If the Metaverse is worse for both Meta and its users, then it might just be a bad idea despite being fancier tech.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Euguene Capon from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
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