Meta Reality Labs lost $3B in the first quarter of 20222

Today, Meta announced its Q1 2022 earnings, which show massive growth for its daily active users, but not so much for the Meta Reality Labs that operate on the metaverse. The news was brought to everyone’s attention by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, and it discussed how expensive it is to construct the metaverse, with the founder predicting that it will soon grow.

Meta declared that it would break out divisional data to illustrate the performance and investments in a group that it thinks critical to the next generation of online social interactions.

The headsets themselves are the biggest promising moneymaker from Meta Reality Labs. The Meta Quest 2 had a significant increase in sales over the holidays, and the company is already planning to release its newest headset, called “Project Cambria,” later this year.

In the first quarter, FRL generated $695 million in revenue, a small fraction of the $27.2 billion generated by Meta’s family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The “metaverse” sector was expected to bring in $683 million in revenue, according to analysts.

“It’s not going to be a large revenue or profit contributor to the business until those products truly hit the market and scale in a meaningful way, and this market ends up being big, this is setting the groundwork for a very exciting 2030” Zuckerberg added.

Late in the quarter, Meta’s social VR app began rolling out creator monetization tools, but such in-app purchases won’t make much of a difference if the platform doesn’t attract a significant number of new users.