to the term 'metaverse' when he decided to shift his focus from social media apps to a whole new world where people could not only communicate but also work and play. A major pivot from a tech giant was sufficient to pique the interest of the people and this was visible in search trends of the year. As seen in the image above, more than halfway through 2021, interest in metaverse was fairly low but jumped sharply as Zuckerberg made his announcement.
The U.S. interest in the metaverse is ranked number nine in the search trends analyzed by Google, sitting behind the United Arab Emirates and only marginally fairing better than Nigeria. This should be rather worrying for Meta which has not only poured tens of billions into the metaverse in the past two quarters but also opened up its metaverse worlds to customers only in the U.S. and Canada, for now.
Even as the investment potential of the metaverse continues to rise, the interest of the general public is waning. In the short period of time, since Meta's announcement, the interest in metaverse has dipped considerably.While some would argue that this is the impact of the news cycle, where something else takes people's attention, the dipping trend is not just global but also seen in the U.S., where a lot of businesses have continued to announce plans of entering the metaverse.
in global searches last year, Coin Telegraph said in its report, while OpenSea, an NFT marketplace hit its all-time high trading volumes earlier this year. Image credit: Google Trends. Metaverse in blue, NFT in red. Is this why Google is not very aggressive with its metaverse plans? Stay ahead with the latest science, technology and innovation news, for free: