40 Top Metaverse Statistics: Money, Users, Expectations (2023 – Onwards)
The metaverse is here . . . sort of. And expected to exceed a market cap of $1 trillion in less than a decade.
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The metaverse is currently valued at $22.79 billion. Meta alone has already invested more than $36 billion into the concept.
There are currently 400 million active monthly users interacting with the metaverse.
Roblox is the most popular platform within the metaverse, with more than 55 million daily active users.
The metaverse currently uses more than 130,000 servers in order to function. IBM estimates that the number will have to increase by 1,000-fold to handle expected increases in demand.
The metaverse is expected to have 2 billion active monthly users and a market cap of $996 billion by 2030.
The average user currently spends less than 1 hour per day in the metaverse.
By 2026, 25 percent of all people are expected to spend at least 4 hours in the metaverse every day.
Analysts do not expect the metaverse to have a profitable year before 2026.
There are more than 155 million minutes of metaverse video content on YouTube, generating more than $6 million in ad revenue.
At its peak, “metaverse” was searched roughly 25 million times each month.
The metaverse is now the primary project for Meta (formerly known as Facebook), and developers are all-in on the concept, many focusing on their own versions. Analysts expect that the metaverse will be the most popular online engagement tool in the world in only a few years, and it is expected to exceed a market cap of $1 trillion in less than a decade.
If you aren't fully familiar with the metaverse, it’s a large-scale, hybrid internet concept that aims to bring a lot of digital technologies together. At its roots, the metaverse is an online meeting place where people can engage with a vast store of digital resources. You can meet people in the metaverse, play games, shop, conduct business meetings, and more.
The challenge with discussing "the metaverse" right now is that it isn't consolidated at all. More than a few competing projects are in the works, and it's much too soon to know which, if any, will turn into a dominant metaverse. Many analysts anticipate that current efforts will eventually be consolidated into a single metaverse, and you will see that expressed in a number of statistics. For now, "the metaverse" can refer to all of the combined projects in this unique market space.
Considering the scale and scope of the concept, it can be a lot to take in, but things start to make a lot more sense when you consider some of the key statistics related to the metaverse. With that in mind, let’s explore some of those statistics and see what they reveal.
Contents
Metaverse Financial Statistics
Metaverse Revenue and Profit Numbers
The metaverse is an extremely large digital project. As such, the statistics on the whole of the project are the sum of many smaller contributors, much of which you will see as we go through the numbers.
For starters, the combination of major metaverse projects is currently valued at $22.79 billion. That’s the total valuation for everything tied to each platform. Those numbers are expected to grow to $996 billion by 2030.
How much have metaverse projects made cornering this unique market? Revenue statistics only currently exist for 2021 and 2022. In 2021, metaverse efforts saw a total revenue of $38.85 billion, and in 2022 that number rose to $47.48 billion. Analysts estimate that these numbers could reach $678 billion in revenue by 2030.
Even with those revenue numbers, profits are negative. While total revenue is up to $86 billion, Meta and external investors have spent more than that to build the current Metaverse (note the capital letter referencing Meta's specific project), and Reality Labs (which runs the Metaverse project) has lost more than $9 billion so far. Losses are expected to continue for several years.
Even though the Metaverse as a whole is losing money, other projects have proven profitable. A clear example of that is Roblox, a metaverse developer that enables users to create games or other experiences and monetize them. As an example, Chipotle launched a burrito-making game, and users in the game can win “burrito bucks” that can be exchanged at stores for actual food.
The average estimated return on investment for these ventures is two percent, meaning that third-party interactions with metaverses are already profitable.
Investments into Metaverse
To truly understand the scope of all metaverse projects, it’s important to take a look at investments that have gone into them so far and planned investments that are still anticipated.
As of the end of 2022, Meta (one of the biggest players in this business) has spent roughly $36 billion on various projects tied to the metaverse. Keeping in mind that this particular project was formally launched by Reality Labs in 2019, that represents almost $9 billion a year into the project over that span.
But, Meta investments are only part of the story. Many private companies and individuals are also investing into metaverse-related projects. Those numbers are harder to total, but a few specific statistics can highlight the value of these investments.
In 2021, Animoca Brands was the leading non-Meta investor and poured roughly $550 million into various projects — mostly centered around building Open Meta (not related to Meta's 'Metaverse') ecosystems. The top 10 external investors all put more than $30 million into various metaverses, and LookMogul invested more than $200 million.
In 2022, investments cooled, but there are still examples like LineTex investing $100 million into a Sytle3D project (a project where fashion meets metaverse).
Even in January of 2023, multiple investors exceeded the $10 million mark. Such investors include Spatial Labs, Emperia, and SYKY.
Moving forward, Meta is still planning to invest billions each year. Mark Zuckerberg stands strong on his claims that the metaverse is the future of computing, and Meta is committed to more than $19 billion a year for the foreseeable future.
Sources: Mobile World Live, The Fashion Law, Seeking Alpha, Nasdaq, Business Insider, Retail Dive, CNBC, Business Wire, Statista
Metaverse Users
People Using Metaverse
As Meta was built out of Facebook, the most popular social media platform in the world, it had access to a wide user base from the start. Currently, Meta estimates that there are 400 million active monthly users in their Metaverse. That’s a far cry from the 2.8 billion active Facebook users right now, but this metaverse is already one of the most popular online platforms in the world.
Among those users, a disproportionate number of them are under the age of 18. Roughly 80 percent of all metaverse users (across all competing platforms) are under the age of 16. In fact, almost a third of all adults have never heard the term “metaverse”, according to surveys.
Metaverse has many different applications and games that are attached to it. The most popular of those is Roblox with 55 million active daily users. This shows that no current application holds a strong majority of users across the whole metaverse market.
As for projections, surveys suggest that 25 percent of people around the world are interested in trying virtual experiences. That means that the metaverse has a total of almost 2 billion potential users. It’s already 20 percent of the way there.
Time Spent in the Metaverse
Seeing the number of people interacting with the metaverse is only part of the story. How much do they use it?
The current average daily use is at less than one hour, but several studies suggest that the trend will change rapidly. According to Gartner, 25 percent of the entire population will spend more than 1 hour per day in the metaverse by 2026. Granted, that prediction was made in 2020, and progress has been a little backward since then, but other resources also suggest rapid growth in metaverse usage.
Another study showed that surveyed individuals expect to spend at least four hours in the metaverse every day. For comparison, the average person currently spends about five hours a day watching TV (using all different platforms). Those uses are expected to involve playing games, watching videos (possibly replacing TV directly), socializing, shopping, working, learning, and more. Metaverse expectations involve a wide array of activities, which is part of why data is currently so fragmented.
Sources: Exploding Topics, Back Linko, Influencer Marketing Hub, Quartz, Gartner
Metaverse Hardware Data
Individual Devices
Understanding the individual devices attached to the metaverse is a little tricky, as there are a large number of compatible devices amongst competing project.
Among them, the best known is probably the Meta series (formerly known as Occulus). This is a VR headset that is owned and developed by Meta, and the current flagship model is the Quest 2. The Quest 2 can interact with the vast majority of metaverse options, and it is a standalone device built for VR interaction.
The Quest 2 has two “screens” (one for each eye) that provide 1,832 X 1,920 resolution. Visuals refresh at 90 Hz. It currently retails at a starting price of $349.00. To date, Meta has sold almost 15 million individual headsets. That is a hardware revenue of over $5 billion and counting.
Users who don’t own a Quest 2 (or any other form of the Quest) can access the metaverse through a number of devices, including smartphones. The most common application of that is Roblox, where nearly 50 million people access Roblox on a mobile device every single day. Currently, mobile device access to the metaverse is more than three times that of VR headset users.
Roblox can also be accessed by PC and Mac computers, but those represent a statistically insignificant number of users. According to Roblox data, the majority of PC and Mac users also use mobile devices to access the platform. The reverse is not true.
Server Commitments
Metaverse projects are not managed by a single, centralized server farm. As such, there is no single statistic that encompasses metaverse usage. That said, large-scale server capacity is already devoted to various metaverses, and that capacity is expected to grow by orders of magnitude in the coming years.
Once again, we can turn to Roblox statistics to help with scale. Roblox currently hosts more than 170,000 software containers using more than 18,000 server devices. As Roblox accounts for roughly 1/7 of all metaverse users, we can estimate that the current combination of metaverses requires close to 130,000 server devices.
According to Intel, that number will not hold for long. The company estimates that the eventual consolidated metaverse will require 1,000 times that server capacity as soon as 2026. That would total 130 million server devices to meet such a demand, and the long-term future of metaverse computation is expected to be even more demanding. Intel suggests that metaverses, by 2030, will require more computing power than currently exists in the world.
Sources: Demand Sage, PC Mag, The Verge, Data Center Frontier
Metaverse Social Statistics
Videos Discussing the Metaverse
The metaverse is a popular topic of conversation. Currently, there are more than 14 million videos on YouTube covering this topic. With an average video length of 11 minutes, that amounts to roughly 155 million minutes of video, all centered on the metaverse. Those videos range from samples of using the metaverse to discussing how it works, economics related to the verse, and more.
Considering that Meta's metaverse project was first announced in 2014 (and remains the largest single endeavor so far), there have been more minutes of video created about the topic than the actual time that has passed since that announcement. In hard numbers, more than 4.7 million minutes have passed from the announcement of the Metaverse to the creation of this article. For each of those minutes, 32 minutes of video content regarding the Metaverse have been created, and that’s only considering YouTube content.
Interestingly enough, as many of those videos are monetized, an estimated $6 million in revenue has been generated just from the ads attached to videos talking about the metaverse.
Articles and Blogs
Written-form content also discusses the metaverse on a regular basis. There are currently more than 13 million published news articles related to this topic. Add in blogs and forum discussions, and the number exceeds 250 million individual entries.
For comparison, the leading topic on all of Google is “Facebook” with more than 25 billion entries. That’s 1,000 times as many entries as compared to metaverse.
Speaking of searches, metaverse is a popular term in Google indexes. At the peak, there were roughly 25 million monthly searches for the term. While that represents a high level of activity compared to most topics, it is a far cry from the top. The most popular search topic in 2022 was “Facebook” with an average of more than 200 million searches each month. It continues to show that Facebook is an order of magnitude more popular and known than the metaverse.
Sources: CoinTelegraph, Google Search Statistics
Metaverse Expectations
The Metaverse and Workplaces
Much of metaverse hype revolves around things not yet realized. As an example, the metaverse is supposed to provide virtual meeting places for many different functions. While the virtual spaces already exist, they haven’t fully caught on yet. There are currently no significant statistics demonstrating the metaverse's popularity in workplaces.
That said, expectations are that things will change dramatically. It is expected that roughly 30 percent of organizations will have work that requires employees to spend time on the metaverse at some point (the survey did not specify an end date).
Similarly, 66 percent of survey respondents think that virtual relearning will be significant for learning in the near future. That is, many students and teachers are expected to utilize the metaverse for learning-specific functions, and it’s anticipated that more than half of learning institutions will adopt the metaverse for at least some functions in the coming years.
Future Engagement Statistics
Even outside of work and school, a lot of people anticipate using the metaverse for a whole lot more than gaming. Roughly 59 percent of people think that the metaverse will completely replace social media. A similar 59 percent think that it will become a vital component of healthcare, probably involving a VR version of telehealth.
More than 40 percent of people expect to do virtual shopping using the metaverse, and 52 percent of respondents expect that the metaverse will be a prime tool for tourism and virtual travel.
Overall, the majority of adults today believe that the metaverse will be a significant part of their lives, tied to health, education, work, entertainment, and more.
Sources: Ipsos
Conclusion
The metaverse is a big concept with a lot of emerging projects. Many of those projects are currently losing money, yet investment isn't slowing. Many investors are true believers, and you can expect that these projects will continue to grow and develop new interactions. Experts clearly expect for metaverse activity to grow, so it will be an interesting corner of the technology world to watch.