Mark Zuckerberg’s aim of turning his social media company into building metaverses may not get fulfilled. Data has shown that interest in metaverse has gotten downhill since the past year.
More than halfway through 2021, interest in metaverse was low but jumped sharply as Zuckerberg made his announcement. Surprisingly, the interest in metaverse came from outside the U.S., with Turkey leading the charge at the global level, with China and Singapore in tow.
Google analyzed that U.S. interest in the metaverse is ranked number nine in the search trends.
Meta has poured tens of billions into the metaverse in the past two quarters and opened its metaverse worlds to customers only in the U.S. and Canada, for now.
Even as the investment potential of the metaverse continues to rise, the interest of the public is waning.
While some would argue that this is the impact of the news cycle, where something else takes people’s attention, the dipping trend is not just global but also seen in the U.S., where a lot of businesses have continued to announce plans of entering the metaverse.
Metaverse is at its one-fifth since last year’s peak and confirms our previous report which revealed that Americans think that the metaverse is just hype.
The steep decline in interest for the metaverse also extends to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that were all the rage last year. In fact, NFTs overtook cryptocurrencies in global searches last year, Coin Telegraph said in its report, while OpenSea, an NFT marketplace hit its all-time high trading volumes earlier this year.
If metaverse is to become the multi-trillion-dollar opportunity that it promises to be, this trend needs to change rapidly.