Global Essence Report outlines Manifest Metaverse: A realistic look at the next digital frontier

A new global Essence report has been released outlining the current state of the metaverse and looks at consumer sentiment, marketer activations, sustainability and the next steps for this new frontier. 

The metaverse that has been promised is a virtual realm populated by virtual towns, planets, and solar systems, where people from around the world - of all races, creeds, and abilities - gather in communities, some niche, some large. They’re there to work, play, learn, and shop. 

That metaverse doesn’t exist. Not yet at any rate. 

What the metaverse label is currently being assigned to is a series of walled gardens that users cannot move between. Despite all the hype about brave new worlds, the majority of experiences at the moment look a lot like video games. That’s because most of them, in some way or another, are. 

We’ve been here before. At the dawn of the millennium, as consumers and marketers rushed to embrace the world wide web, few could have predicted YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok. 

According to a report by Bloomberg, the global market for metaverse is estimated at $478.7B in 2020 and projected to reach $783.3B by 2024 at a CAGR of 13.1%. 

On the other hand, some of the hype has far outstripped reality. In April of 2022, CoinDesk, using DappRadar data, pegged the average daily active users for Axie Infinity at 107,240. For The Sandbox, it was 1,180; for Decentraland, it was 978. 

Roblox, meanwhile, reported 54.1 million daily active users for the first quarter of 2022. Fortnite daily active users for 2022 so far is 24.2 million.

For comparison, Twitter has 229 million daily active users and Facebook has 1.93 billion. 

For a deeper dive into this new frontier - including a look at consumer sentiment, marketer activations, sustainability, and next steps - read the latest report from Essence about the current state of the metaverse.