A few months ago, Mark Zuckerberg had a spectacular stunt. It had been under attack for weeks because of a former executive who had passed a mountain of papers to a newspaper and to the American Congress documenting how and why Facebook over the years had put profits before users’ safety, their privacy, their well-being.
An attack even heavier than the one suffered on the occasion of Trump’s election to the White House, the de facto duty of which had all been dumped on the shoulders of an unscrupulous company, Cambridge Analytica. And also of that on the occasion of the assault on Congress fomented by false news, shared on social media, about the elections stolen by President Biden. The Facebook Papers attack was more difficult to face because it questioned the company’s business model: user profiling done through algorithms that reward the virality of content, even if false or dangerous. Then Zuckerberg displaced everyone: he organized a spectacular presentation of his vision of the metaverse and changed the name of the group leader to Meta which also includes WhatsApp and Instagram. And suddenly there was talk of nothing else.
If it was a diversion, it must be said that it worked great. Let’s clarify. The metaverse is not just that: it is probably there new frontier of the Web and our digital lives, on which the best engineers of Silicon Valley are working, supported by the investments of the most famous venture capitalists. Talent plus capital is a formula that hardly fails: we’ll get there. But not today, not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow. In a few years. While the Facebook problem is now. Some say Mark Zuckerberg he launched himself into the future to escape from a complicated present, but then the present arrived.
The financial data that led to the spectacular collapse yesterday (Meta at 3:59 pm was worth 900 billion dollars; thirty minutes later he had lost $ 180 billion in market value); that data clearly says that something has jammed in the Menlo Park money machine.
The most obvious lever that slowed the gears was the Apple’s choice to allow users of its apps to clearly choose whether to be tracked by the profiling algorithms or not: many are evidently saying no (Apple’s choice has cost Meta 10 billion dollars in the last 6 months and the forecast is to lose more 10 in 2022). But beyond the official data there is something deeper: Facebook has bored us. Of course, the monthly users, although slightly down, are almost two billion, a stratospheric number. And yet it is the time we spend on the app that has changed: we are less happy with it, post less things, interact less. Facebook is a listed club we are partners because it holds many of our memories and because there are many of our friends, but we don’t like to go to anymore. After 18 years (he turns them tomorrow) it was inevitable sooner or later. In the meantime, Instagram suffers from competition from TikTok, which, on the other hand, is spreading among the youngest (while the Reels, the Instagram videos, are struggling to grind profits); And WhatsApp it is very popular but without a convincing business model.
In short, Zuckerberg is at a narrow passage, but the end is not written. Even in the summer of 2018 at one point Facebook lost 20%, over $ 100 billion in hours. We wrote that an era was over. But then he got them all back and started growing again. If only the metaverse wasn’t that far away yet …