Facebook's er Meta's bet on vanity on or of the net

While Facebook is under fire in the media, Mark Zuckerberg has also presented a headline-grabbing plan for the transformation of his company. Facebook, which is now called Meta, wants to build a metaverse over the course of this decade and beyond. This refers to a digital world that you usually enter as a three-dimensional representation of yourself, ideally, for the feeling in the middle of it, with virtual reality glasses on your head.

The idea of the metaverse comes from science fiction novels of the likes as "Snow Crash". Zuckerberg sees such an environment that can be experienced as a 3D avatar as the "successor to the mobile internet". One could see his plan as an attempt to marry the hype about "Second Life" with the gigantic reach of Facebook services and its Oculus VR headsets, as a billion-dollar bet on the next big thing.

It may be that the Facebook metaverse never prevails or that it will be a story full of setbacks and plan changes, such as Facebook's attempt to establish the digital currency Libra, which is now called Diem. And it also seems possible that other companies will build more attractive online worlds. Facebook wants to make its future platform accessible to as many people as possible, which probably means that there is advertising in metaverse.

Erotic contend, on the other hand, a reliable accelerator of technology trends, does not fit the previous company image, just as does a focus on privacy and security that Facebook promises for its metaverse.

However, Facebook's chances are supported by the fact that it wants to invest several billions in the metaverse project, allegedly including 10,000 new jobs in Europe. In addition, Facebook will be difficult to shake off: If, for example, a start-up succeeds in a breakthrough first, it may well be that the company, such as WhatsApp and Instagram, incorporates itself. Alternatively, Facebook could copy concepts of the competition and make them accessible to its users - send greetings to ideas from Snapchat and TikTok in Instagram.

What Mark Zuckerberg said about avatars and digital objects on Thursday is pretty remarkable. In his developer conference keynote, he said that in his opinion, you should be able to use everything you buy in metaverse in different apps and experiences. This has to be understood as a side blow, for example, against costumes from games such as "Fortnite", which can only be worn in the world of this single game after purchase, as big as it may be by now (some also call "Fortnite" a metaverse).

The question of what users look like in the metaverse and what virtual goods they can own will have a say in the commercial success of the project. Because the sale of digital costumes and accessories or even land and furnishings should be one of the most lucrative sources of income for the metaverse operators. This is evidenced by the fact that the creative process of designing the virtual goods can be easily outsourced to other companies or even individual users, as long as you continue to benefit from the sales of particularly sought-after content in the form of a commission. "Roblox", for example, a popular gaming platform among children and adults, has perfected this principle. Here, users create content for other users, with tools of the operating company that earn money from such transactions.

Some people may find the idea of spending money on digital objects strange. But often such offers pay off when only a certain proportion of users buy something every now and then and a small part spends very regularly - or even a lot of - money. In the video game world, even purely cosmetic changes that have no influence on gameplay have been in demand for years. There are gaming items that are worth three to five-digit sums to players.

Similar trends can be expected in metaverse, at the latest when companies such as sneaker manufacturers would become active there, as they are already notorious to make products particularly interesting through artificial scarcity and clever marketing. A sneaker that only exists once could quickly lead to a bidding war in metaverse.

And such a thing would only be the extreme cases: Should it really come to the point that many millions of people - Zuckerberg dreams of one billion users - use the metaverse to hang out, but also to work, or to make new contacts, their digital image should not be unimportant to them. At a VR date, for example, or a VR sales conversation, someone might want to face their counterpart differently than with a free 08/15 avatar.

And if you now invest hours of work or a professional shoot in your profile pictures on Instagram, Tinder or LinkedIn, you will also have requirements for your 3D variant. Vanity, but also fashion and brand constraints as well as status symbols are not offline phenomena. Stories of students who were supposedly bullied because they did not wear cool costumes in the game, for example, have already circulated stories from the Fortnite universe, where so-called legendary costumes regularly cost around 20 euros. The NFT market, which revolves around the possession of virtual goods and in which millions of euros are paid, also shows how in demand digital objects can be if you can speculate or specify with them.

Mark Zuckerberg himself said in his presentation that metaverse users will "have a wardrobe with virtual clothes for different occasions, which comes from different creators and from different apps and experiences". That sounds a lot like:Users will be able to spend money in many places. And when Zuckerberg listed at the very beginning what you could do in the metaverse, the points of meeting friends and family, working, learning and playing followed by this one: shopping.

The metaverse could not only be expensive for Facebook.