Mark Zuckerberg sees the metaverse as a ‘massive economy’ with a billion+ people by 2030

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Platforms (META), says his company has its eyes on further business expansion targeting the metaverse. The company, which has billions of users across its family of social media arms – Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp – has plans to have similar numbers explore the metaverse.

He told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in an interview that Meta’s ‘north star’ is to have a billion people in the metaverse by the end of the decade.

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According to him, the growth would see billions of dollars transacted as people buy digital goods, digital content and such other things as they interact.

Our north star is that by the end of the decade we hope to basically get around a billion in the metaverse, doing hundreds of dollars of commerce each – buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves.”

Metaverse will be big for creators

Zuckerberg also talked about the overall impact of the metaverse to the creator economy and the company’s business.

As more people get into the virtual and augmented reality space, growth in commerce and broader productivity would create an opportunity for a “massive economy.” 

He sees the most benefit going to creators, boosting what he calls the “creator economy.”

I think there’s going to be a massive economy around this. It’s going to create a lot of opportunity for creators. That’s why you hear me talk about the creator economy so much.”

Metaverse for Meta business opportunity

On what the metaverse holds for Meta in terms of business, the Facebook co-founders noted that this “certainly” does present them with a great opportunity. He pointed to the company’s playbook (way of scaling projects), which is to “build services, try to serve as many people as possible.”

Once the company succeeds in getting its services to millions, a billion, two billion, or three billion people, the next step is to monetize these services.

Having done that with Facebook and Instagram, Meta is eyeing monetization of WhatsApp, which is seeing a lot of traction around business messaging and commerce.

But the metaverse and the digital commerce space is also going to be a “big leg” of Meta’s business going forward, Zuckerberg said.

Metaverse standards body formed

On Wednesday, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia were among tech giants who launched the Metaverse Standards Forum. The goal of the forum is to develop open standards for the participants in the space.  

Notably though, two of tech’s biggest players in Apple and Google are not among the forum’s founding members. 

Decentraland (MANA) and The Sandbox (SAND), two leading metaverse-linked platforms are also not part of the initial group.