Selena Gomez is a great pivoter, but not everyone can do it as well.
Meta is having a lot of problems in the real world as it moves to focus on digital worlds. Shares of the company that used to be called Facebook fell more than 22% after it said that revenue for the current quarter would fall short of expectations.
Meta has a lot of problems, but one of them is that its social networks aren’t as popular as those of companies like TikTok.
In the last three months, the number of people who use Facebook every month stayed the same at 2.91 billion.
They also dropped from 1.93 billion to 1.92 billion daily users. It’s the first time in Facebook’s history that the number of people who use the site every day has dropped.
Meta also said that Apple’s privacy changes and supply chain problems have hurt its ad sales, which make up the majority of its revenue.
Metaverse is there to help.
Last October, Meta changed its name to Meta. As part of the change, the company said it would separate its Family of Apps unit from other products that were part of its push into the metaverse, like virtual reality headsets. This is the first time that Reality Labs has shown its financials. It made $877 million in revenue but lost $3.3 billion in the last three months of 2013. It cost Reality Labs more than $10 billion to lose all of that money in 2021.
It shows that the transformation of Meta into a metaverse company will be a long and expensive one, but one that CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks is necessary for the company to be a leader in the “next chapter of the internet,” which is what he calls it.
It says that 24% of the more than 3,000 job listings at Meta are for AR/VR jobs. And the company has already said that it plans to hire 10,000 people in the EU to work on the metaverse.
Some teams at Facebook and Instagram have been cut back, and people who work on those products expect to get less money in the second half of the year, according to the Times.
In the big picture, Meta is having a hard time, but Alphabet, the company Meta shares with, is having a great time. Alphabet’s stock rose 7.5% after it reported a huge profit Tuesday.