Facebook (FB) often tends to go with the wind blowing in tech.
When one of its rivals has a feature that works, the social media giant rushes to create an in-house version to prevent users and advertisers flocking to competitors. We saw it not too long ago with Instagram Reels, which is "a new way to create and discover short, entertaining videos on Instagram," the company announced on August 2020.
Reels is a built-in feature on Instagram that lets you edit and post short music videos. The concept is almost a copycat of TikTok, the successful application owned by Chinese company ByteDance. In use, the resemblance is obvious. Same vertical scrolling, same looping playback and same video mosaic on users profile. Instagram has also taken over the principle of algorithmic suggestions from its competitor, which offers relevant content to users based on their presumed tastes.
With this in mind, it's no surprise that Facebook jumped on the podcast and audio bandwagon last year amidst the success of the Clubhouse audio app, one of the big winners in the pandemic economy of Covid-19.
Podcasts, an Opportunity That Quickly Died Out
Launched in April 2020 in San Francisco, Clubhouse is a social networking application developed by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth. It's an audio social network that allows its users, by invitation, to chat in private rooms. Based on audio and voice strength, when Clubhouse users join the club, they have access to rooms filled with different people talking about different topics.
Clubhouse thus met with immediate success. The platform itself took advantage of the success of podcasts, apps and messaging services where users exchange only voice and sound messages. The principle being that the voice is a vector of emotions, nuances, humanity and empathy. It is a positive channel.
The valuation of Clubhouse thus rose very quickly, crossing $4 billion. Faced with this meteoric rise, most tech bands started copying Clubhouse. Spotify (SPOT) has notably made a big bet on audio by announcing big deals with personalities like Joe Rogan around his podcast.
Facebook was no exception. Last June, the group, founded and led by Mark Zuckerberg, launched Live Audio Rooms, short stories called Soundbites and podcasts.
"Live Audio Rooms on Facebook enable you to discover, listen in on and join live conversations with public figures, experts and others about topics you’re interested in," Fidji Simo, head of Facebook App said in a blog post. "Public figures can invite friends, followers, verified public figures, or any listeners in the room to be a speaker."
But less than a year later, Facebook is abandoning the audio market. A report from Bloomberg suggests that Meta is no longer investing in Podcasts. A Meta company spokesperson confirmed to TheStreet that it had nothing to share on audio today.
Facebook is focusing now on getting feedback from creators and the podcast community to find out what on what’s working well and what we can improve. The company is also stressing out that it believes audio is an important medium for expression.
Facebook is seeing good engagement with our audio features, the spokesperson said without providing further details.
Metavers Is The Number One Priority
The firm's ambitions in audio are mostly victims of the company's new priority which is the metaverse. Facebook changed its name at the end of October to become Meta Platforms. This change is more than cosmetic because the company now wants to focus on turning the virtual world, in which we will interact via avatars, into an economic opportunity.
Mark Zuckerberg's group is currently developing virtual reality headsets and other tech tools and gadgets using augmented reality and artificial intelligence which we will use in this metaverse.
As Rob Lenihan of TheStreet wrote last week, Facebook plans to take a big chunks sales made by its metaverse creators as fees. The company is looking to enable creators to monetize what they're building in Horizon Worlds, their social metaverse platform for Quest VR headsets.
The social media giant is rolling out a test with a handful of creators that will let them sell virtual items and effects within their worlds.
Meta is planning to take an overall cut of up to 47.5% on the sale of digital assets on Horizon Worlds. The overall charge comprises of 30% hardware platform fee for sales made through Meta Quest Store, where it sells apps and games meant for its virtual reality headsets, and a further 17.5% cut as its Horizon platform fees.
That's more than the 30% fee Apple charges app developers.
It should be remembered that Facebook has often strongly criticized this practice of its neighbor in Silicon Valley.
