Did Meta Start Talking Less About “the Metaverse” Due to Wall Street / Madison Ave Pushback? (Comments of the Week)

Lots of interesting chat in comments and on social media for my post about Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth heatedly insisting to me — “Dude just take the L“– that the company was still focused on the Metaverse despite not mentioning it in his latest “vision of the future post”.

Rony Abovitz, founder and former CEO of the heavily-funded AR company Magic Leap — he hired literal Neal Stephenson as the company’s chief futurist — thinks any current reluctance by Meta to mention “the Metaverse” too much now is basically about current perceptions with the investment world:

They realize that their version of “metaverse” is tainted with respect to Wall Street. They will build whatever they want to build – and either name it something else or not even name it all (except for the pesky fact that the whole shebang is called “Meta”). It is a perception game…

— Rony Abovitz (@rabovitz) April 28, 2023

“They realize that their version of ‘metaverse’ is tainted with respect to Wall Street,” as he put it to me. “They will build whatever they want to build — and either name it something else or not even name it all (except for the pesky fact that the whole shebang is called ‘Meta’). It is a perception game.”

Given Abovitz’s background, I tend to think that’s plausible.  And as it happens, a Meta insider recently told me almost the exact same thing:

“I don’t believe Wall Street wants Meta to be investing giant sums in technology that won’t be in products for 5-10 years,” as they put it to me.

On a related note, longtime reader  Joey1058 had a similar speculation:

I have a left field opinion, which is unprovable. My take is that Meta did a few of its surveys amongst its regular large advertisers. Most answering that it didn’t see a profit in scaling its ads within Meta’s vision of the ‘verse. Advertising on a forums platform like Facebook is relatively affordable since it’s a shotgun approach. The more ads you try to get in a room full of avatars will only chase them away. A few billboard ads that scroll isn’t popular either, as the advertisers will have to wait in turn for their ad to scroll in before they can count numbers. I think Meta is letting the pot simmer until they figure out the next ingredient.

This also sounds plausible, especially since Bosworth actually has no prior metaverse-related experience, but did lead Meta/Facebook’s mobile advertising efforts for many years. So he’s extremely well-positioned to have Meta’s very top advertisers tell him to his face that they don’t get “this metaverse stuff” as an advertising platform, especially compared to hyper-targeted Facebook ads which work extremely well.

I’m told that we should expect to see some major updates to Horizon, Meta’s metaverse platform, very soon, so perhaps that’s the “next ingredient”, especially as they’re more directly relevant to Meta’s advertising revenue. 

All that to one side, it remains a mystery why Meta invested so much of its focus on a metaverse vision that was so ill-defined that a majority of its own employees now believe Zuckerberg hasn’t explained it clearly to them. (Someone should write a book about that!) I guess the good news is both Zuckerberg and Boz are now insisting Meta is still dedicated to the Metaverse — even to the point of telling random metaverse writers to take the L.