Adam Kos Perhaps we have the twilight of social media as we know it here. Twitter belongs to Elon Musk and its future is directed purely by his whims, Meta is still Mark Zuckerberg's, but it cannot be said that he holds its reins firmly. On the other hand, TikTok is still growing here, and BeReal is also poking out its horns.
Facebook is still the most popular social network, judging by the number of accounts. In September of this year, he had them according to Statista.com to 2,910 billion. The second is YouTube with 2,562 billion, the third WhatsApp with 2 billion and the fourth Instagram with 1,478 billion, i.e. the third Meta platform among the first four. But 6. TikTok has a billion and is growing significantly faster (Snapchat has 557 billion and Twitter 436 billion).
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Vratislav Holub Stocks are falling and falling
But one thing is the one that determines success by the number of users, another by the share price, and those Metas are falling precipitously. When Facebook changed its name to Meta last year, there was a lot of controversy associated with it, which has not subsided to this day. Because the new name does not visibly mean a new beginning, even if they are trying to build a metaverse here, even if we have a new product for virtual reality consumption, others are cutting corners.
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If we look at the state of the shares, exactly one year ago one share of Meta was worth 347,56 USD, when the price started to slowly fall. The highest figure was reached on September 10 at $378,69. Now the share price is $113,02, which is simply a 67% drop. The value thus returns to March 2016.
Dismissal and discontinuation of products
Last week, Meta laid off 11 of its employees, overshadowing the firing of Twitter's leadership by Elon Musk. It's as if all of a sudden the whole of Czech Humpolec had nothing to poke at (or Prachatice, Sušice, Rumburk, etc.). So it was really only a matter of time before such a move would also cause the death of some of the ambitious projects of this social media giant. Now we know that it didn't last long and we say goodbye to smart displays and watches.
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Meta so practically she immediately stopped the development of the Portal smart display, along with its two yet-to-be-released smartwatches. The information was released by Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth. To halt development work, he said it would take so long and cost so much investment to get the device on sale that: "it seemed like a bad way to invest my time and money."
At the height of the pandemic, there was a brief moment when Meta's Portal product managed to be a relative success, simplifying communication between people who couldn't connect with family and friends in person (which also applies to tablets, whose segment is currently experiencing a major slump as the market already fed). But as the pandemic receded and the world started talking face-to-face again, demand for Portal skyrocketed. Earlier this year, Meta decided to sell it directly to companies rather than individual customers, but the product's share of the smart display field was only about 1%.
According to Bosworth, Meta had two smartwatch models in development. But we will never see them again, because the team has moved to the one working on augmented reality products. As part of the overall reorganization, Meta will reportedly establish a specialized division whose task will be to solve complex technical obstacles. It is true that better late than later. But we'll see how it goes. But if the metaverse doesn't catch on, Meta will still have a problem 10 years from now, and the fact that Facebook is the biggest won't change that. As you can see, even young "socialites" can take hold quite well.
