"Meta was trying to solve a consumer problem that doesn't exist. You can't build a mass social platform reliant on hardware most people neither own nor want to wear for more than short bursts."
"Advertisers follow their target audiences. And those audiences were never inside Horizon Worlds."
"Owning your own chatbot ads feels like a no-brainer - unless, that is, nobody's talking to the chatbot. Then you've just wasted a lot of time and resources on something that doesn't reflect actual online shopping habits."
The ad tech industry faces a fundamental build-versus-buy decision, exemplified by Walmart's dual approach of partnering with OpenAI and Google while developing proprietary AI agents like Sparky. However, building custom solutions risks wasting resources if users don't engage with them. Meta's metaverse failure illustrates this danger: despite billions invested and major partnerships, Horizon Worlds never achieved popularity comparable to VRChat or Roblox. Consumers preferred social media over virtual worlds, and Meta failed to demonstrate value for advertisers. The platform relied on hardware adoption that consumers didn't want, and audiences never materialized inside Horizon Worlds, causing Meta to remove it from Quest app stores by March 31 and shut down the VR version entirely by June 15.
Read at AdExchanger
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