Internet
Facebook turns 20: The money machine for the Metaverse dream
The Meta corporate headquarters in Menlo Park (Silicon Valley). photo
© Tony Avelar/AP/dpa
20 years after it was founded, Facebook has three billion users. The online network is therefore a reliable source of money – but founder Mark Zuckerberg’s focus is already on new projects.
Four days before Facebook’s 20th birthday (February 4th), founder Mark Zuckerberg had a US senator accuse him of having “blood on his hands.” It was in a hearing on the safety of children online – and Zuckerberg apologized to affected parents in the Senate chamber. The next day he announced a 25 percent jump in sales and a quarterly profit for the parent company Meta of $14 billion, three times more than a year earlier.
This contrast represents the past 20 years. There have been data protection scandals. There were allegations that Facebook and Instagram were harming children and young people. There were concerns that Russian online campaigns could manipulate public opinion in the United States. But what matters from the company’s perspective is that people like to use Meta’s services such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. And with them come the advertisers and the money.
Three billion users a month
The platforms know so much about the interests of their members that they can precisely target the right addressees for their ads to advertisers. The meta business also absorbed the shock after Apple’s move to let iPhone users decide whether they wanted to have their activities tracked across different apps.
Most recently, 3.98 billion users accessed one of Meta’s apps at least once a month – and 3.19 billion even accessed them daily. The flagship Facebook had a good three billion users monthly and 2.11 billion every day. These are huge numbers, especially considering a global population of around eight billion people – not all of whom are still online.
For several years, Zuckerberg pursued ambitious ideas to help the rest of the world get online. This should work, among other things, with satellites and automated antenna drones. But the group decided to leave it to the telecom companies.
Instead, Meta and Zuckerberg now have two big projects: artificial intelligence and the Metaverse, a kind of digital world for work and fun. The founder believes so much in the future in virtual reality that he had the company name changed from Facebook to Meta in autumn 2021.
The message is now: Facebook may be the cradle of the company, but it is only a part of something bigger. As a further sign of this, the company no longer wants to give Facebook user numbers in the future, but only how many were active in at least one meta app every day.
The money machine is running
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s dream of the Metaverse is consuming mountains of money – and yet remains a niche business. Last year alone, the Reality Labs division’s operating loss rose to over $16 billion – with sales of just $1.9 billion. When the advertising business showed signs of weakness, investors became a little grumpy about the unbridled spending on the virtual future.
But now Meta’s money machine is running at full speed again – and no one is raising the question of Reality Labs’ chances of success anymore. The new company name remains, although the Metaverse fantasies have now been pushed into the background by the hype about artificial intelligence.
Here, too, Zuckerberg stated the goal of developing nothing less than “the most popular and advanced AI products”. If this succeeds, every user of meta services will have a “world-class AI assistant” – and every company will have an AI that can communicate with its customers.
In the Facebook of the future, will people communicate more with software than with people? “People want authenticity,” said product manager Chris Cox recently. Ideally, software with artificial intelligence will unleash users’ creativity and make their lives easier. At the same time, no AI has yet been seen that would be really useful for many people in their everyday lives, he admitted.