There has been a staggering amount of hype around “the metaverse” over the past six months to a year, with major brands from McDonald’s to Gucci jumping in and shouting it from the rooftops.
But when it comes to the metaverse that marketers are actually talking about now — the blockchain-based worlds like Decentraland and The Sandbox that are, at least partially, up and running — a look at the actual user numbers does more than give pause.
It does, or at least should, raise serious questions about the value of spending any time and money in metaverse marketing at all, at least for now.
If you look at some of the analysts’ excited predictions, it makes sense: Citi puts the total addressable market value of the metaverse, in all of its incarnations, at $13 trillion by 2030, and Morgan Stanley arrived at a similar figure in February — although it toned down the highlighted number to $8.3 trillion by not factoring in as-yet-undetermined new immersive marketing experiences.
But if you dig down in that Citi report, you’ll see that they reached that number by assuming the metaverse would replace the internet altogether in less than a decade, adding the value of “internet-related revenue to that of the physical-world activities being displaced.”
So, what are you getting for your marketing dollars in 2022? Eyeballs? Click-throughs?
No.
Or at least, not a whole lot.
Is Anyone Actually Using It?
In March, the number of active daily users in Decentraland was 978, according to crypto industry news outlet CoinDesk. On June 2, the metaverse’s blog claimed more than 8,000. Decentraland’s MANA token has a market capitalization of $1.8 billion as of Wednesday (June 8).
CoinDesk put The Sandbox’s active daily users at 1,180 in March. Its market cap was $1.6 billion.
In a June report, the U.S. crypto exchange Kraken’s Intelligence unit said…