Tech companies like Google and Apple are always looking ahead at what the future might look like and how technology could make the transition easier. It was back in January 2007 that Steve Jobs transformed the entire world when he revealed the original iPhone. Once modeled after a brick with buttons, Apple introduced a world not to a new way of communicating but to the billion-dollar industry of apps. Three years before the iPhone, the world once again was changed thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and his creation of Facebook. Now, 18 years later, Zuckerberg and the newly-coined META believe that the next step in human civilization lies in the world of virtual reality. And while the thought of literally surfing the web has been around for some time, it seems the idea has cost META a staggering $15 billion so far and they have little to show for it.

According to the Wall Street Journal, internal META documents are showing how costly the metaverse is and how the company even fell short when it came to active users. “The company planned to hit 500,000 users of its virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, by the end of 2022. The number at the time of writing is less than 200,000, still well below a revised goal of 280,000 by the end of 2022. The documents also reveal that the majority of those 200,000 users, don’t come back after entering the system once with many complaining most of the areas are bereft of other users.”

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It should be noted that since the Spring of 2022, the number of active users in Horizon Worlds has declined. Looking at the metaverse as a whole, less than 10 percent of the worlds available receive more than 50 visitors. The majority receive none.

Giving an example, Forbes recently detailed the value of the New England Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys. Both are considered the most-valuable teams in the world at $8 billion for the Cowboys and $6.4 billion for the Patriots. That means that META could have purchased the two most-prized teams in the NFL with the money they lost exploring the potential in the metaverse.

Speaking with The Verge, Mark Zuckerberg proposed his endgame with the metaverse, stating, “my hope, if we do this well, I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company. And obviously, all of the work that we’re doing across the apps that people use today contribute directly to this vision in terms of building community and creators. But this is something that I’m spending a lot of time on, thinking a lot about, we’re working on a ton. And I think it’s just a big part of the next chapter for the work that we’re going to do in the whole industry.”