Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook, has shared how the metaverse will be a key part of his business and bring hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. “Our playbook over time has been build services, try to serve as many people as possible,” said Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg on the Metaverse
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, spoke about the Metaverse in an interview Wednesday with Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money.
The Facebook co-founder explained that he expects the metaverse to be massive and become a major part of his company’s business over the next decade. Commenting on Meta’s metaverse efforts, Zuckerberg said:
Our playbook over time has been to build services, to try to serve as many people as possible – you know, to offer our services to a billion, two billion, three billion people, and then we expand the subsequent monetization.
“We hope to, basically, get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce each,” he continued, adding that people could be “buying digital goods, digital content, [or] different things to express themselves” in the metaverse.
Some examples of what people can buy are “clothes for their avatar or different digital products for their virtual home or items to decorate their virtual conference room,” Zuckerberg listed. He added that people can also buy “utilities so they can be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse.”
However, he admitted that there is a long way to go, stating:
I still think it’s going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there.
“So it is the pole star. I think we will get there. But, you know, the other services that we run are already on a bit larger scale today,” he said.
Zuckerberg envisioned experiences in the metaverse to be more immersive than text, photos, or videos, noting that people can even make eye contact when meeting in the metaverse. The technology “basically adds up to making it deliver this realistic sense of presence,” the Facebook co-founder added.
“We’re at this point, you know, a company that can afford to make big investments in long-term research, and that’s an important goal,” the CEO of Meta said.
Last week, Meta, Microsoft, and 31 other companies formed a metaverse standards group. In March, Meta filed eight trademark applications for its logo and Meta Pay covering the metaverse and crypto services.
Several large companies have estimated the size of the metaverse. McKinsey & Company said last week that the Metaverse could generate $5 trillion by 2030. In March, Citi predicted that the Metaverse could represent a $13 trillion opportunity with five billion users of by 2030. Global investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both see the metaverse as an $8 trillion opportunity.
