Facebook Owner Meta Records 16 Percent Surge in Annual Revenue, Metaverse Unit Still Under Loss

Last year, Meta, which runs the world’s most popular social media site Facebook, saw its revenue grow by 16 percent to $134.9 billion. In the fourth quarter of last year, the company’s revenue was $40.1 billion. Company chief Mark Zuckerberg said that the last year has been good in terms of revenue.

However, the company’s Reality Labs unit has been in losses for the last three years. Zuckerberg said, “Our business and community have grown in the fourth quarter of last year. We have made great progress in AI and the metaverse.” Facebook launched about three years ago Meta It was rebranded as . Zuckerberg also informed about the plan to explore the possibilities in the metaverse. A new unit Reality Labs was created for this.

In the last three years, Reality Labs has launched hardware products like Quest VR related to Metaverse and Augmented Reality (AR). By March last year, Meta had sold about two crore units of Quest headsets. Big technology companies like Meta and Google are facing difficulties due to non-compliance of regulations in some countries. Recently, the central government had said that the dominance of big ad-tech companies on the Internet is a matter of concern. These companies include internet search engine Google and social media platform Facebook Regulators in some other countries have taken action against the monopoly of these companies.

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar had said that the revenue sharing model between digital news publishers and big tech companies has been tilted by these companies and this is a matter of concern for the government. He said that there has been a big change in the country regarding the digital and tech segment. The country is no longer seen as a place to start a low-cost back office, but as an important partner. Chandrashekhar said, “We are concerned about the big imbalance between those who create content and those who help monetize it. From a policy point of view, we want to keep the Internet open. We do not want monetization on the Internet to be in the control of one, two or three companies.”