Will the Metaverse have the same impact on digital marketing as social media? – Understanding the ledger

A new scholarly paper on the Metaverse explores its role as a digital marketing tool. This shows that Metaverse is a new medium being used for marketing purposes along with the Internet, social media and other digital marketing channels. This heralds the dawn of a new marketing era.
The author is right. If you go back to MySpace, online marketing looked very different before the launch of Facebook. Actually it is email, SEO, Google Adwords and banner ads. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube dominate today.
If you are interested in the definition of the metaverse described in this article, then it is virtual reality with web3, a blockchain-based earth, and a commodity digital economy.
The author believes that Roblox, Fortnite and Decentraland can be the equivalents of the Metaverse of Facebook and Twitter. However, we don’t think Decentraland’s position is as strong as it is with other companies as Facebook overtakes MySpace or Google overtakes AltaVista. After all, we have only touched on the potential of the Metaverse.
What separates virtual worlds from the virtual world boom of the mid-2000s, which was touted but not mainstream? While SecondLife and IMVU survived, there were many others, including those from Google and Sony. The experience is not fundamentally different from Decentraland. Will digital property be the key differentiator? Or the co-creation implied by decentralized governance?
This short paper does not address other factors that could accelerate adoption, such as the advent of headphones that make people more immersive. Or there are social networks that drive network effects. Or the adoption of the enterprise by large corporations reflects the business adoption patterns of personal computers that are of interest to consumers.
But when it comes to ownership, the owners of NFT Boring Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) wield considerable commercial power. “It was unthinkable for The Walt Disney Company to allow the next generation of customers to create, own and sell merchandise using their Metaverse avatars,” the authors write.
The article concludes by suggesting several directions for future research. For example, how can Metaverse be used to improve customer interactions? How is Metaverse Commerce different from e-commerce? And how metaverses and traditional companies can monetize digital assets differently.