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MARK ZUCKERBERG
FACEBOOK / METAVERSE Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Pitch Is Falling Flat 
Original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-31/mark-zuckerberg-s-metaverse-flails-on-joe-rogan-podcast Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | ||
Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Pitch Is Falling Flat
The Facebook founder’s alpha-male appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast—UFC! tired hands! “wrestling around with friends”!—will do little to turn that around.
Illustration: Konrad Adam Modrzejewski for Bloomberg Businessweek
Written by Max Chafkin @chafkin
August 31, 2022 at 7:00 AM EDT
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Forget about the devastating reviews from the video game press, the cringe-worthy digital “selfie,” and the notable lack of legs— Mark Zuckerberg wants you to focus on the promise of the metaverse. The founder of Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc., appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Aug. 25, undaunted by the recent mockery aimed at Horizon Worlds, his company’s Second Life knockoff, and determined to pitch the benefits of spending the hours with the equivalent of a smartphone strapped to your face.
In addition to giving Rogan an early version of the company’s forthcoming headset, known as Project Cambria, Zuckerberg also used the interview to attempt a sort of personal rebranding designed, one assumes, to align with his decision to focus his attention on virtual and augmented reality. During his nearly three-hour interview with the comedian and mixed martial arts commentator, Zuckerberg—the classics geek and coding prodigy—presented himself, improbably, as a combat sports-obsessed gym rat. He referred to himself as a three-sport varsity athlete, proclaimed a newfound love of jujitsu (he’d hired one of Rogan’s friends as his coach), and, sounding not at all like a billionaire who’d adopted a hobby to impress a talk radio host, said that among his favorite pastimes was “just wrestling around with friends. It’s awesome.”
This was embarrassing, or it should have been. That’s not only because Zuckerberg is almost 40, but also because of the host he was trying so hard to flatter. Rogan has played a key role in promoting Covid-19 misinformation, putting him at odds with Zuckerberg’s pro-vaccination stance and Facebook’s own content policies. Since the start of the pandemic, Rogan has provided a friendly audience for anti-vaccine influencers and promoted ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug beloved by contrarian media types that’s been repeatedly shown to be ineffective as a treatment for the virus that causes Covid. Rogan apologized earlier this year for having used racist language on his show. He also apologized, sort of, for the Covid misinformation, though the day after Zuckerberg’s episode aired, Rogan welcomed Alex Berenson, the writer who spent much of the pandemic promoting the false idea that vaccines were more dangerous than the disease. The day after that was Aaron Rodgers, the anti-vax quarterback.
But Zuckerberg hadn’t flown to Austin to tut-tut one of the most influential media figures in America. He was there to court Rogan’s mostly male fan base, estimated at around 11 million per episode. During the interview, the Facebook founder argued that VR and AR would revolutionize work, socialization, and exercise, and would displace other forms of entertainment, especially television. Zuckerberg said that, personally, he doesn’t watch TV, except for UFC bouts, because he considers the medium to be overly “passive,” as compared with social media. “You’re just sitting around in this beta state, consuming stuff,” he said.
Techies, of course, use the word “beta” all the time to refer to unfinished products, but Zuckerberg didn’t seem to mean it that way. He was using “beta” the way Rogan and members of the manosphere use it—as in “beta male,” the opposite of “alpha male”—to imply that there was something effeminate about watching TV. Apparently for Zuckerberg, real men scroll. Although in his super-manly vision of the VR-enabled future, we won’t even have to use our hands to do the scrolling because that would be exhausting and feel “weird.” (“Most people’s hands will just get tired,” he said, raising his hands, apparently to show just how annoying physical movement can be.) Instead, Zuckerberg said, social media interactions would happen on smart glasses (more advanced versions of the Ray-Ban frames Meta already sells) and would be controlled by brain waves.
“You’ll be able to have this experience in the future, where you’re sitting in a meeting, and your wife texts you, and it pops up in the corner of your glasses,” Zuckerberg said. “You want to respond, but you don’t want to pull out your phone because that’s kind of rude.” Users of Meta’s augmented reality products, he continued, will be able to send messages using a “virtual hand” that they control with their mind to send text messages. “No one even knows you’re doing it, and you just, like, send a message.”
As a pitch, this doesn’t make much sense, not least because, as Rogan himself noted with some exasperation, Zuckerberg is proposing to take what’s possibly the worst thing about mobile phones—the extent to which they intrude on normal life—and magnify it. Moreover, suggesting that VR products are somehow “alpha” might grab the attention of Rogan’s audience, but it hardly seems like a good way to sell a product to a mass market. The non-Roganite community of humankind doesn’t care much, if ever, about the “alphaness” of a product. Moreover, Rogan viewers might be tempted to ask whether Mark Zuckerberg, tired hands and all, is really a reliable authority on masculinity. Is texting your spouse on the sly alpha behavior?
If Zuckerberg’s latest marketing efforts seem amusing and self-defeating, they also show just how badly the company has flubbed its pivot into the metaverse. It began more than eight years ago with the purchase of Oculus VR for $2 billion and has expanded pretty much each year since then with little to show for it. Meta has built an unbelievably efficient business selling online ads that appear in its social media properties, which brought in $116 billion in revenue and $57 billion in profit in 2021. Reality Labs, the company’s name for its VR and AR business, generated revenue of only $2 billion, a tiny figure by comparison that looks even worse when you consider how much money Meta spent to generate it.
Meta reported a $10 billion loss on Reality Labs in 2021, not including the billions Facebook spent buying Oculus and developing, manufacturing, and marketing successive VR headsets between 2014 and 2020. Last year’s epic losses have only widened this year, up 15% in the most recent quarter from the same period in 2021.
Zuckerberg has presented these losses as investments, as if Meta were directing all of that money into fundamental research and as if these ideas are brand-new to consumers. But Facebook has spent most of its history as a publicly traded company aggressively marketing VR headsets, both on its own enormous platform and elsewhere. I first heard Zuckerberg’s VR pitch in 2015, a year after the Oculus acquisition. Listening to the Rogan podcast, it was striking how little had changed since then. Back in the mid-2010s, Zuckerberg and his deputies were talking up the way the company’s VR product, then known as the Rift, gave users a sense of physical presence, which they said would be game-changing for remote work, among other uses. They acknowledged that VR would be a big deal for games. But the video game business, they said, was just the beginning.
This was heady stuff, and it was hard not to be impressed. But consumers have responded much less enthusiastically, and Facebook has churned through a series of executives as it as sought to find a winning formula. In 2016, for the commercial release of the Rift, the company set up pop-up shops inside 500 Best Buy stores to promote the new device, only to close hundreds of them the following year after consumers didn’t show up for the demos. Since then, Zuckerberg has promoted VR devices, often awkwardly, at countless keynotes and in media appearances. In February, during the Super Bowl, he aired an elaborately produced (and bizarre) one-minute ad in which an elderly animatronic dog reclaimed his rock ’n’ roll glory by jamming with friends inside the VR game Horizon Worlds.
Facebook has been promoting Horizon Worlds for three years. It was first introduced in 2019 with a different elaborate marketing campaign. Zuckerberg still insists it will be great for games and meetings, even as it continues to attract mockery, from laypeople and VR enthusiasts alike. On Aug. 26, the day after Zuckerberg’s alpha performance on Rogan, Vivek Sharma, who oversaw the game, announced his resignation from the company.
To be fair, Meta has had some modest successes. Its latest VR headset, the Quest 2, has moved almost 15 million units, according to analyst estimates, since it went on sale two years ago. That’s good—putting the VR product in line with the performance of other gaming consoles—but the financial performance of Reality Labs and the recent news that the company would raise prices suggest that Meta has been selling the device at a substantial loss.
In February, after the Super Bowl commercial, the company announced that 300,000 people had followed the animatronic dog into its VR platform. That sounds impressive—Meta noted that the figure represented a tenfold increase from monthly usage in December—but it’s still a fraction of what Second Life attracted at the peak of its popularity, and it’s barely a ripple by Facebook standards. Its flagship social networking app attracts about 2 billion people per day; that figure is almost 3 billion when you include Instagram and WhatsApp. In other words, despite years of promotion, billions of dollars of investment, and a wildly expensive Super Bowl ad, all the company has been able to muster is a monthly audience that’s 0.01% of what it attracts on a Tuesday. If Horizon Worlds were made by some other company, Zuckerberg probably wouldn’t even bother copying it.
As the Rogan appearance might suggest, it’s been hard, at times, to separate this marketing push from Zuckerberg’s own vanity. After getting dragged online for posting a “selfie” featuring a cartoon avatar and a crude depiction of the Eiffel Tower that looked as if it had been ripped straight out of a ’90s video game, Zuckerberg reappeared a few days later on Instagram with a new and improved personal avatar. According to a subsequently deleted LinkedIn post from a Meta visual artist, the avatar had been the product of four weeks of work and 40 different versions. It looked as if Zuckerberg had the metaverse version of the small army of image managers he once employed to curate his Facebook page.
Luckily for Zuckerberg, the company’s advertising business is big enough and well-established enough that it can safely lose billions on the metaverse for years to come, while still preserving its social media dominance. But, as the company, which declined to comment, struggles to explain exactly what the metaverse is and who it’s for, it’s tempting to wonder whether the founder and chief executive officer is still the best spokesperson for these efforts. When Meta was a social network, it made a certain sense to treat Mark Zuckerberg’s own Facebook page as the company’s core branding asset. But today, Zuckerberg looks nothing like the prototypical Meta user. He’s a married, 38-year-old billionaire with a personal trainer, clumsily trying to apply the social networking playbook to sell an even more intrusive technology. It’s not the most alpha thing to contemplate, but it might be worth asking for help.
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| The text being discussed is available at | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-31/mark-zuckerberg-s-metaverse-flails-on-joe-rogan-podcast and |