So-called collectibles should be a kind of currency and a way of monetization for creators. Meta wanted to ride the hype surrounding NFTs, which it eventually was. The function for this is now being discontinued on Facebook and Instagram. This appears to be part of Mark Zuckerberg’s efficiency alignment and strategy realignment. He is increasingly relying on the new trend of artificial intelligence instead of his Metaverse, which was once advertised.
Stephane Kasriel announces the product news on Twitter, a rather unusual way for Meta. The fintech lead writes that they want to focus on other ways to support content creators, people and businesses. Meta learned a lot from trying it out, which could be incorporated into later product releases – “already today and in the Metaverse.” The new focus in terms of monetization is on the reels, the short Tiktok-style videos. In addition, work is continuing on Meta Pay and the options for paying directly via Messenger. Already last year, the long-surrounded cryptocurrency Diem, previously called Libra, and the wallet Novi, previously called Calibra, were discontinued. The “Zuck Buck” – a kind of app-internal token – is also history.
Following the hype: goodbye NFTs, hello AI
Meta only provided a kind of toolbox for creators last winter with which NFTs could be created. They should sell them to fans and earn money that way. Keeping content creators on their own platforms seems to be the major competition between social networks at the moment. With the creators come the followers, the active usage time, the opportunity to play out advertising – Meta’s core source of income, but also that of Youtube, Tiktok and Co. There are numerous ways for fans to pay for content, for example with virtual stars , which are simply comparable to a paid thumbs up.
NFTs are still available in the Metaverse. There, for example, luxury brands also sell their goods as digital versions or offer expensive products for testing. Nevertheless, the cut on the other meta-platforms shows that the company is heading in a different direction: In the “Year of Efficiency” proclaimed by Mark Zuckerberg, projects should be scrapped more quickly if they don’t bring quick success. Thousands of employees will also have to go. The announcement of further job cuts is currently being awaited.
Zuckerberg obviously expects more efficiency from the hyped topic of artificial intelligence than from the metaverse, at least this has come to the fore. “We’re creating a top-level group at Meta focused on generative AI to move even faster in this space,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. First of all, it’s about creative tools, in the long term AI models are to be developed that help people in different ways: in texts on WhatsApp and Messenger, in images and filters as well as videos for Instagram, for example. Meta is also developing a chatbot, they have already announced LLaMA for this, but the language model is not yet available.
(emw)
