Welcome to the Summarin - your weekly dose of commentary and summaries of the most interesting topics from the world of culture, media and commerce. If you are new around here and like what you read, hit the subscribe button below.
In today’s edition (18.4.22):
Meta announces its plans for creators in their metaverse
An NFT-themed restaurant
Hollywood embraces NFT monkeys
47.5
Meta was able to stir the emotions of web3 people this week by announcing it is going to open up its VR platform to creators who want to sell digital goods. For a couple of days, all the talk and outrage was about the fees the company is planning to charge and how that compares to open metaverses which are much, much cheaper to use (as these platforms take a smaller percentage). An announcement like that was deemed to come out sooner or later, and it was always going to be met with a series of memefied contra responses.
But while the crowds on Twitter are making fun of the proposed fee structures, Meta is doing more for the popularization of the metaverse and digital goods than the mobs who signal their dislike to centralized solutions. Below, I have a few thoughts I wanted to share and expand on my thesis that, ultimately, for metaverses to become mainstream, Meta and other commercially-driven entities will need to lead the way.
Meta will let Horizon creators sell virtual items (The Verge)
“Meta is testing new features to let creators make money within Horizon Worlds, the company’s social metaverse platform for Quest VR headsets that is soon coming to mobile phones and possibly game consoles.”
This is bound to become the next revenue stream for Meta. I am expecting to see multiple case studies announced by Meta over the next months of partnerships with brands who will start dipping their toes in this new offering. From a commercial standpoint, it makes sense - the company has built a huge advertising business but it has seen challenges with regards to privacy by its competitors, Apple and Google in particular, who are swiftly tightening their grip on data-sharing and tracking. With Horizon Worlds, Meta has an opportunity to keep the data faucets open if mass adoption of their devices can be achieved. If Quest products turn mainstream, the company is in a very advantageous position to finally build on top of hardware it owns and dictate the rules of tracking and data collection.
Then, there is other side of this story that made its way through the web3 Twitter grapevine. That is the fees which Meta is going to charge creators to sell digital items.
The roughly 47.5% of fees became a meme of their own, synonymous with the evil that privately-owned, commercially-driven metaverses are. The twitterati were quick to unite under the banner of a free and open metaverse, ridiculing the announcement from Meta.
Time will tell which camp will be on the right side of history, but allow me to advocate on the side of the greedy corporation here.
On its surface, the fee of 47.5% sounds intimidating. BUT… let’s start with the buts🍑.
But Meta has scale (more than 2 billion users) which serves as a perfect foundation on which to launch new platforms and services. They can try to pull all those people into the new thing they are serious about.
But onboarding into Horizon Worlds is much easier than onboarding users in web3. For one, you need a Facebook account. For the other - you need to get a wallet, deal with secrets and keys, acquire cryptocurrency, transfer some amount to a said platform, pay fees, try not to get scammed.
But is Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed about people’s psychology and attention, and has proven time and again that he can make the right moves in anticipation of changing user habits. Whether through their own platforms or by acquisition, Meta can ensure a dominant position on the market of metaverse worlds.
But thanks to its established relationships with advertisers and media buyers, plus a wide array of agency partners who are going to do the promotion to their clients in search of more business, it will be easier to attract brands on the platforms who will eagerly spend their hefty budgets in an environment their compliance and legal teams are much more comfortable to participate in. Once the first brands come in, others will follow simply to not be left behind. And as we have seen with NFTs, it is brands tinkering in this new space that has done the most to spice up the image of the medium and attract more users. Centralization is an ally to commercialization. I expanded on this idea in a previous edition of the newsletter - #65 Bridging:
But the fee of 47.5% is not set in stone and once the platform achieves scale, Meta can easily decrease or even eliminate it. It is plausible to assume that the company will be able to offset creator costs by shifting them to advertisers.
When the dust settles, in a few years’ time, we’ll probably be faced with various types of privately owned and public metaverses. I believe it is possible to even have hybrid ones. We’ll be jumping across each one and participate within set boundaries. The centralized worlds will likely be very popular and serve a general portion of the population that is looking for entertainment or social connection (ala Facebook). Perhaps, they will use it for work, by their own choice or due to a requirement imposed by an employer - similar to how people nowadays are using Teams, Zoom, Meet, Skype… And then, for the more adventurous types, there will be a multitude of open metaverses, each serving a different community and purpose. My point is that there is a market for everyone and both the centralized and decentralized models will find eager participants.
The first fast-food NFT-themed restaurant launched last week (Mitko Dimitrov)
“Degens want a place where they can meet other degens and also spend $APE. Nothing will replace IRL connections, I don’t care how good the metaverse will be!”
The ability to leverage a brand’s intellectual property (IP) is a leading indicator for a successful metaverse play. In this one, we have a restaurant chain making the jump from in-real-life (IRL) to web3 and tying the two words in a way that benefits the community and the business, and future-proofing the relationship between the two. Read story.
I’ve written a lot about this topic in previous issues and most recently in #65 Foundations:
Bored Apes Go Hollywood With Coinbase-Produced Movie Trilogy (CoinDesk)
“The first of three installments for the series of animated short films, titled “The Degen Trilogy,” will premiere at NFT.NYC in June, with the NFT community of apes and non-apes alike having a say in parts of the film’s plot.”
A web3-native brand that has emerged as the dominant player in the space is the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and it has been fascinating to follow the collective’s moves into developing the IP. Read story
Gen Z’s new favorite app (Axios)
“Downloads of BeReal, Gen Z's hot new social media app, have skyrocketed in recent months, giving the world's mobile-first generation a new way to connect through the work or school day.”
This one is worth keeping an eye on. Developed by a French-based company, the app sends a notification to you and your friends at a certain time and all of you have two minutes to share a photo (simultaneously with both the front and back cameras) of where you are and what you are doing. The spontaneity of the mechanism is appealing even to me. It will be interesting to track this one. If you wanna be friends, here’s my account. Read story
Tweets
That’s all for this week. Catch you all in the next one.
Have a good week!
Marin