Meta, the social network formerly known as Facebook and no doubt to be renamed Facebook in a few years, announced that its Metaverse division has posted another huge loss, despite the surprising addition of legs to Avatar last year Meta Reality Labs, the VR and Metaverse division, posted a loss of $4.279 billion in the fourth quarter (compared to just $3.304 billion in the year-ago quarter), on revenues of $727 million (compared to $877 million in the year-ago quarter).

The Reality Labs division, known as the Oculus division before Meta decided it preferred that name, is now an umbrella that describes both VR and the broader Metaverse project. This was the quarter in which Meta raised the price of its Quest 2 headset by $100 and launched the Meta Quest Pro headset ($1500). The real headline, however, is that Meta is not concerned about these losses and sees the Metaverse project as a long-term future, not a current money pit.

Meta has a forthcoming Meta Quest 3 headset targeted at a broader market, a Meta Quest Pro intended as a business product, and other as yet unnamed projects including glasses and other platforms (platforms here meaning hardware as well as software including hardware as well as software), and they continue to invest in other as yet unnamed projects.

"2022 was a difficult year, but [...]. Software and social platforms may be the most important part of what we're doing," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call with analysts (Thanks, VentureBeat (opens in new tab)). Meta's stock price rose about 15% after the news.

This probably means that even though Meta's overall quarterly sales of $32.165 billion and net income of $4.652 billion are significantly lower than the same period last year ($33.671 billion in sales and $10.285 billion in net income), the $5 billion generated from aunts who liked your dog's picture That would be because of the $1.0 billion generated. More importantly, from an analyst's perspective, the overall Meta product had an average of 2.96 billion daily active users in December (up 5% from the same period last year) and 3.74 billion monthly active users (up 4%). These numbers slightly exceeded Meta's own targets

. Facebook just reached the milestone of 2 billion daily active users," Zuckerberg said. 'Our AI discovery engine and the advances we've made in reel are the major drivers of this.' Besides this, our management theme for 2023 is "The Year of Efficiency" and we are focused on becoming a stronger and more agile organization."

Oh dear. Perhaps Meta's staff should polish up their resumes. Interestingly, this may have been a slight nod to retired John Carmack, a video game legend who joined Meta, became a consultant, and eventually left.

The reference to the reel is the panic that all social media companies are experiencing with the explosive popularity of TikTok. However, Meta's overall goal remains firmly set on the metaverse in which we will all undoubtedly live our lives and how AI can be integrated throughout their products, and they consider the Meta Quest Pro the first of many Mixed Reality (MR) devices.

"I think the MR ecosystem is relatively new and will grow over the years," Zuckerberg said. Well, he would say that.