I don't usually read my own website, but I've been working on a bit of a redesign/refresh lately, so couldn't really help notice that there's a lot of metaverse stuff in my recent posts. Not really surprising - I've been looking at metaverse stuff a lot over the last year or so. But although I'm still excited about what I think the metaverse will be, I've also been getting disillusioned by what lots of people seem to be saying the metaverse is.

My first metaverse post, all the way back in November 2021(!) opened by drawing the same sort of distinction;

The Metaverse is here...
Well, not here. Not the actual metaverse, in the actual world. But in the strange parallel universe of the 'media/marketing industry', its definitely here. And its been here since before Facebook became 'Meta'.

I'm feeling less positive about the version of the metaverse that is 'here'. In fact, I'm pretty sick of it. The Fortnite sponsorships getting presented as 'metaverse', the brands in Roblox that have nothing to do with the Roblox-playing audience, anything happening in Decentraland (Ok, Decentraland is probably the closest thing we actually have to an actual web3/metaverse environment and is doing interesting stuff at a tech/platform level - but that doesn't take away from the fact that its pretty crap and there's nobody there.) I'm not even going to get started on NFTs...

Here are some 'findings' from a recent Qualtrics study; I don't mean to pick on it in particular - its just the latest example of this kind of thing that I've seen;

The demographic that spends the most time on metaverse are males (63%) and consumers aged 26-41 (59%)
38% of consumers personally spend their time in the metaverse
62% of consumers are likely to purchase a product through the metaverse
Of the consumers that spend time on metaverse, only 2% say it is their preferred channel for personal use
97% of marketers say they are likely to be advertising more on the metaverse five years from now
91% of marketers are aware of the metaverse and 74% are already advertising on it
59% of marketers who are advertising on the metaverse say it is their most successful channel
37% of marketers who do not currently advertise on the metaverse say there isn’t enough validation or proof that metaverse advertising works
40% of marketers who do not currently advertise on the metaverse say the top reason for increased usage would be more marketing resources

Usually, when I'm complaining about 'research', I'm looking at things like question design (framed to elicit a particular response), the sample used (which used to generally be about sample size - these days it tends to be more around how representative the sample is). But 'metaverse studies' seem to take things to a different level.

I have this framework I use to talk about 'data driven insights'; the whole point of 'data' is to help you understand truths about the world, insights are an application of 'truths' to a relevant question that can help you build a strategy that tells you what to do.

Illustration of a process framework of moving from "Question" to "Data" to "Truth" to "Insight" to "Strategy" to "Action"

The issue here isn't really about the data, but what it represents. What the data says and what it really means are completely different, because the metaverse... doesn't exist yet. Nobody is there. So nobody is advertising there. No advertising is working... (or failing, come to that.)

It feels like this is going down the road of a Buddhist koan; "If a tree falls down in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?"¹ … "If an advertiser spends money on a metaverse activation and nobody is there to see it, is it really an advert?"²

Anyway, I'm not going to do a full-on rant about all the bullshit thats currently getting sprinkled with metaverse-dust, because luckily for me I don't have to, because James Whatley (Chief Strategy Officer at gaming agency Diva) gave a "the metaverse does not exist" presentation at the 2022 BIMA Beyond conference, which included this slide;

"Anybody who stands on this stage and tells you the metaverse is the future hasn't got a fucking clue and you should *not* be OK with that"

...which subsequently exploded on LinkedIn/Twitter etc.

He's since 'recreated' the presentation (and posted the slides and speaker notes) here - https://diva.agency/news-and-insights/metaverse-what-metaverse. The 'in a nutshell' version is that the metaverse doesn't exist yet, and what people are selling (or shilling) as "metaverse" products are actually just about gaming. So why don't we just call it 'gaming'?

And now, every time I feel the urge to explain to someone that the metaverse doesn't exist yet, I can just take a few deep breaths and send them that link, while I contemplate a falling tree in a lonely forest.

No - 'sound' isn't a physical process, but the interpretation by your brain of the signals your ears send your brain through your nervous system. ↩
No, because 'advertising content' taken out of context isn't advertising - its just 'content'. I wrote a post about why I don't watch adverts out of context. But advertising money being spent where there isn't an audience has another name - fraud. ↩

Some Random Nerd