New York — Since October, Facebook has renamed the company, articulated a vision of the internet where people can digitally connect through virtual-reality avatars or teleport to see places like ancient Rome, and helped trigger the metaverse investment craze.
The company is hiring engineers and buying up multiple virtual reality gaming studios to build towards the metaverse, which is a broad futuristic idea of shared virtual realms that can be accessed via different devices and which Zuckerberg is betting will be the successor to the mobile internet. Meta has said it expects non-advertising revenue to be down year over year in the fourth quarter as it compares unfavourably with the “strong launch” of its VR Quest 2 headsets during the previous year's holiday shopping season.
“The Apple tracking change clearly had a negative impact on Facebook in the September quarter,” said Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney. “The question is, were they able to further mitigate that risk ... or did it become bigger?”