Please.. No Ads in the Metaverse!

Welcome to the fourth edition of the ‘Metaverse Monthly’ LinkedIn newsletter. In this newsletter I'll update you on the latest metaverse news and I'm also sharing some insights I got from different articles.

The questions I think about a lot:

• How do we prevent large technology companies and commercial corporations from gaining power over the metaverse? (ps: I'm writing a longread article on Web3)
• How to prevent the metaverse from being filled with dumb ads??
• How do we ensure that the metaverse really adds something genuinely valuable to today's digital landscape?
• How do we ensure real human contact when more and more of our communication will be digital?

ps: Want to stay up to date on more tech news? Then sign up for my highly appreciated 'Trending in Tech ' newsletter. When you subscribe now you will immediately receive my 6 tech-books/reports for free in your inbox.?

See you soon, until the next newsletter. If you have any ideas or input, I would love to hear them!?

Kind regards, Jarno

Speaker | Author | Tech-expert

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• Microsoft bought gaming studio Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion?as a way to create the “building blocks for the metaverse.”
• Meta—which I will keep calling Facebook— ?is at work on the world’s most powerful supercomputer , in order to power the metaverse.
• The company is also reportedly?planning to introduce NFT features?on its Facebook and Instagram platforms and also the ability to mint, trade and collect their own NFTs facilitated by their marketplace.
• Facebook is also winding down?Diem , their stablecoin project. The Diem association will sell all their assets including intellectual property and the payment network. So: No Facebook crypto.
• Nike sued online reseller StockX for selling unauthorized images of Nike shoes as non-fungible tokens.
• Disney is placing its bets on sports streaming and the metaverse.
• Twitter has allowed users to transform their NFTs into hexagonal profile pictures . This validates my story: NFTs are very often confirmations of status and identity.?

How the ‘Metaverse’ Could Become China’s Next Bubble .

Key insight: Facebook / Meta mostly created the metaverse hype.

An interesting perspective is that we have Facebook’s marketingteam to thank/blame for much of the metaverse hype rather than any pioneering hardware or software breakthrough. And let's be honest, you can't blame Facebook: the company needs a new story to sell investors: a story capable of sustaining it through dark times ahead.

And it works, not only towards investors: the number of Chinese companies working on the “metaverse” increased?tenfold?since the announcement of Facebook changing their name to Meta.

The critical question you may also ask (and you know I like to ask the critical questions); what real metaverse innovations justify the current enthusiasm? How do we avoid getting caught up in our own stories of what the metaverse could be????

Andy Warhol, Clay Christensen, and Vitalik Buterin walk into a bar .

Key insight: Everything is infused with imaginative value.

“Which NFTs people find attractive to buy, and which ones they do not, is [also] a question of legitimacy: if everyone agrees that one NFT is interesting and another NFT is lame, then people will strongly prefer buying the first, because it would have both higher value for bragging rights and personal pride in holding it, and because it could be resold for more because everyone else is thinking in the same way.”

(....) It’s not just about creating objects of desire, but about creating new mechanisms for signaling status.?

(...) Apple wasn’t selling hardware and software. It was selling identity and a sense of meaning. (...) The new $40 billion market for NFTs takes this idea to the next level.

(...) So when we talk about building a new financial system with crypto, we’re not talking about just rebuilding the plumbing of the existing system with fancy new pipes, we’re questioning how value is created and who gets it.

How to Build a Better Metaverse .

Key insight: There are ways to prevent the Facebook-ization of virtual reality. Second Life knows what to do.

WIRED talks to one of the founders of Second Life, the oldskool VR world, about the advertisement based VR world that Zuckerberg is trying to build: "If Facebook is successful at building a metaverse with behavioral ad targeting, it's just a very, very bad outcome. But it's not inevitable at all.(...) Second Life makes more per person who uses it, per year, than YouTube or Facebook does".?

Advertisement should not be the only revenue model in the metaverse. On the contrary, the new virtual world offers new ways to make the money. Think of?transaction fees, NFTs and virtual fashion.

ps: VR headsets are far from perfect. So are avatars.

ps2: Not everything has to be decentralized to work well.?

What marketing in the metaverse will look like .

Key insight: There are multiple ways to make money in the metaverse. Other than hijacking our attention to watch ads.

How can brands profit from the opportunities of the metaverse today? How can you experiment with it in ways that can benefit your brand, image, customer experience and even make a profit from it? Steven van Belleghem sees 6 opportunities.

1. Advertisement: Fairly old-fashioned: showing ads where people are. Bad idea IMHO. Red flag.
2. Virtual Influencers: Daisy , for instance, is a virtual influencer created for online luxury discount site Yoox. She was featured in multi-brand campaigns, wearing clothes by Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. ps: virtual influencers are now often still a gimmick , exceptions aside.?
3. Advergames: An advertising technique where games are used as a means of advertising products or services.
4. Virtual Venues: Verizon brought the Super Bowl stadium to Fortnite. Vans launched a virtual skatepark in Roblox that lets players try new tricks.
5. Virtual Events: Think of the millions of people that watched Travis Scott’s concert on Fortnite and the Lil Nas X concert on Roblox.
6. Metaverse commerce: the direct-to-avatar (D2A) economy, where brands are starting to sell digital goods inside the metaverse.

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