Metaverse (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that the majority of Metaverse will be built in India due to the large pool of developer, entrepreneur and creator communities in the country that he and other technology companies are referring to. The next version of mobile Internet.
“The developer ecosystem, given the ecosystem of individual entrepreneurs, the spirit around it is one of the things that makes India so special. We are going to see a huge amount of stuff being manufactured in India,” he said at the social media giant’s second Fuel for India virtual event.
Defining it as an “immersive and embodied” version of the Internet “where you feel like you are”, Zuckerberg said the metaverse cannot be built by a small number of companies or without a commerce model built around it. could. Some of the use cases he outlined for the proposed digital world include gaming, sports, entertainment, fitness, education and training, which creators and businesses will need to build.
“When we think about where all these creators and developers are going to come from to build the foundation of the metaverse, it is clear that India is going to be a big part of it,” he said, adding that India is the largest country. world using the group’s Facebook and WhatsApp apps. He added that Instagram usage is also growing incredibly fast.
There are two things that make India an attractive proposition Zuckerberg has for his plan for the metaverse – the entrepreneurial spirit and the scale of what could be.
India is the single largest market for Meta, with over 500 million users across its family of apps. According to the then IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, it had around 530 million WhatsApp users, 410 million Facebook users and 210 million Instagram users as of February 2021. Other tech apps Twitter and YouTube had 17.5 million and 448 million users.
“We just want to make sure that we do our part to continue to unlock the possibilities as people’s experiences here are going to improve the lives of people around the world,” Zuckerberg said. The company plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union in what it calls the Metaverse. But no such India-specific scheme has been announced so far.
According to a filing with the Registrar of Companies, Meta has reported a 41 per cent jump in its annual gross advertising revenue in India at Rs 9,326 crore as of March 2021.
The firm makes money by displaying targeted ads on its users on its platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Messenger) based on its history and impressions generated through it for advertisers.