Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook’s future is “young people” and meta universe

Faced with various reports of Facebook misleading shareholders on the issue of the loss of teenagers and young users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the latest earnings meeting that the company is “re-adjusting” to make “serving young people” its top priority. In order to achieve this goal, both Facebook and Instagram will make “significant changes.” In addition, Facebook will spend billions of dollars to build its meta-universe vision.

At the meeting Zuckerberg also mentioned that the competitive pressure from TikTok and iMessage has been intensifying. Facebook will take more measures to win “young” users between the ages of 18 and 29 even at the expense of old users. Reels used to fight TikTok “will play an equally important role as Stories in the future”, Instagram and Facebook “will further bias towards videos next year,” and “Reels will become a more core part of the experience.”

At the same time Zuckerberg also emphasized that Facebook is “re-adjusting” internally, and that in the future, young users will become their “North Star”, but he also knows that this transition “will take years rather than just a few months.” The recent whistleblower incident and some internal data that have flowed out have made it clearer that Facebook has long been ineffective in dealing with issues related to younger users. To reverse this situation, they have to do more than simply say a few words by the CEO (in fact, Zuckerberg still believes that the whistleblowing incident is a selective use of leaked files to discredit Facebook).

Zuckerberg also said at the meeting that another important thing for the company at the moment is to build its “meta universe” vision. Although he did not comment on the report that Facebook plans to change its name to reflect the focus of AR/VR business, he also admitted that he is concerned about this. One area does have great ambitions. “Our goal is to bring the scale of Metaverse to 1 billion people,” Zuckerberg said. “Metaverse may bring a digital business market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”

It is worth mentioning that Facebook also used this meeting to announce that in the future they will report two sets of financial data. The two come from “family” apps including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, as well as the Reality Labs department responsible for AR and VR. In a previous statement, they revealed that due to their investment in Reality Labs, its profits in 2021 will be reduced by 10 billion US dollars. However, it also emphasized that it will only increase AR and VR related expenditures in the next “years.”