Metaverse Monetization: Where is the Money? 22 Revenue Streams #metaverse #xr
22 revenue streams in the Metaverse including virtual land, events, wearables, LTD, pay to play and more
How to make money if you are a metaverse (augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality – cross reality platform Host/provider) – the revenue streams to consider.
My original Social Virtual Worlds (Social Networking) monetization diagram for reference.
Transcript of lecture with timestamps
Hello. My name is Laurel Papworth. I’m a university lecturer, Metaverse mentor and consultant to
corporates and government primarily today. I wanted to adapt my 22 revenue streams for virtual
worlds and bring them into the Metaverse so that we have some modern real world examples to go with the revenue streams. I initially recorded this as a quick video and it turned into 1 hour and 20 minutes, which is more than a keynote, more than my keynote. [00:00:00.670]
So we’re recording at really high level and try and bring this down to ten to twelve minutes. We’ll see if we can do it. Beatsaber is an augmented reality game that’s available on the Oculus and other headsets. It’s from a tech company and there are around 4 million players that have paid the joining fee. There’s exceptions which I’ll talk about in a moment, but they also have addons and expansion packs. [00:00:30.420]
We call them expansion packs in this world but they could be called franchises if you’re thinking
movies. But the expansion packs one song is a dollar 99 and they sell them in bundles. So at 400 million, I think downloads that’s a substantial revenue at 1.99 each. BeatSaver is now a Meta company, it’s now a Facebook company and the Oculus is now including Beats Saver with the new Oculus as from the end of 2022. So I expect that revenue to shift and move around. [00:00:59.000]
I want to talk about events and there’s real world events, there’s mixed reality events and then there’s inworld events. So we’ll talk about the inworld events. Decentraland is an Argentinian company, one of the largest virtual worlds. And Sotheby’s held its first Metaverse auction inside Decentraland in March 2022. Decentraland hosted through the metaverse group, the Metaverse fashion week and the brands that rented space were Tommy Hilfiger, Estee Lauder, Dolce e Gabbana and other brands. [00:01:40.740]
I don’t know. But lots of brands came together for Metaverse Fashion Week because I mentioned Metaverse Fashion Week I want to talk about the Metaverse Group who are purchasing out virtual land and then renting it out. Hiring out on selling it at a corporate level. Presumably bundled with ideas because when I looked at the website they were very much a marketing company. A marketing and real estate company in the Metaverse. [00:02:20.830]
The Metaverse Group Realty rented out the Decentraland property for $2.5 million for the Metaverse Fashion Week and their portfolio of real estate is around $30 million currently. Expect that might actually have grown. I haven’t checked the latest numbers but that means that they’re very an interesting group to watch. Metaverse Realty groups. Other clients include Forever 21 and Sketchers and major companies like that. [00:02:48.920]
So I think we’ll see quite a bit happening with real estate and also markets within markets. So the host is Decentraland, the users are using services within centre land and then the third party partners, the commercial clients, are coming in and buying at real estate and then on selling that into another market, which is the corporate market. So we’re starting to see that layering effect that always happens within an economy like well, any economy with human beings in it, which would be all of them. Just a final note on Virtual Land and on running ticketed events as being monetization, Decentraland had deal with the RCN credit network and were providing mortgages for lands in Decentraland. I think they’ve stopped that, but I would expect it to make it come back sooner or later, especially with price tags of $2.5 million per plot. [00:03:18.500]
In some cases, Play to Earn is where the user makes money by using a service and then there’s
usually benefits back to either the commercial clients or the host if the user uses those services.
Example play to earn is alien worlds. And Alien Worlds uses an NFT defy, which is NFT is your store of wealth and DeFi is being able to use that token for things like loans and wealth generation in other ways. So a combined NFT device isn’t just a store of wealth, it allows for the liquidity and the medium of exchange part of a currency to occur as well. So Alien Worlds uses a token called something alien – Trillium. [00:04:17.830]
So they lease out spacecrafts using trillium and then as you travel through the Metaverse and collect NFTs it’s a kind of fun game, I guess, with NFTs and spacecrafts and you earn while you’re playing. I would suggest that a similar revenue stream to Play to Earn would be ice poker. While poker itself is an obvious revenue stream, the wearables, such as the Platinum Cigar diamond Cigar wearable, which is sold between 400 US and thousands and thousands of us. If you have one of those, it gives you tokens every day so that you can save them up. I think it’s $50 until you get to $50 or something like that and then you can start to play poker. [00:05:10.850]
So it’s a wearable that accrues you. Yeah, money while you’re wearing it. I need one of those in real life, an area of monetization that I think is really going to destabilise. I don’t want to use any of the other buzzwords because people play buzz bingo with Metaverse, so I’ll just say destabilise. The Netflix Prime video YouTube model is the Theatre Network and T Fuel. [00:06:07.750]
It’s an interesting token because the user earns the tokens by watching the videos, so it becomes more of a peer to peer attention economy and you can spend your tokens on governance. How do we want to run this community? Use your token to vote and I’m going to talk about, I guess, representational, democracy, direct democracy and how these worlds are showing other ways for us to self organise society in another video. That’s very close to my heart, but it needs more research. There’s quite a lot of worlds out there where you’re using your tokens for governance. [00:06:39.590]
And I’d like to explore if there are any real world repercussions at the moment. There will be, but I don’t think they’re out there at the moment. If you know of local government or state government or national government, federal government who are using tokens as a way to encourage direct democracy, Brazil perhaps, please let me know. I do think it’s worth investigating the virtual goods market because really they could be quite separate revenue streams with their own regulations around them, depending on what it is that you’re purchasing and how you’re purchasing it and how it’s being advertised. And there’s already been some court cases, FTC and advertising regulations being bought against metadata based companies because of the way they’re presenting virtual goods, tokens, blockchain, all that kind of stuff. [00:07:22.150]
So I would currently stood up virtual goods into three or four main categories. One is land and real estate, one is wearables fashion and that sort of thing. Another one is emojis and they tend to sit separate. So an emoji could be that you pay $400 for a dance move and then you go to the local virtual club and you show your dance moves off that nobody else has because nobody else has spent $400 on those moves. So that’s an interesting one. [00:08:18.660]
And the last one is names. So owning a specific name, trading those names on open sea looks at the moment like a large market. It reminds me of the early domain name market. I think it might still be the same in domain names today. I don’t know, I don’t follow it anymore. [00:08:56.330]
But that idea about owning your brand, owning who you are, of course there are some other odd
virtual goods that still happen. The company, remember, sells memorial stones for around zero point 25, Ethereum $200 or maybe $300. [00:09:15.090]
There are some others that I think would be I’m going to let you explore. So for instance, there’s RP, which is role playing and that can be a peer to peer market. Then there’s ERP, which is erotic roleplaying. That one you’re definitely going to have to Google yourself. There’s also a $50 million a quarter being made by VALVE or Steam, I think at the same company, or one’s the parent company of the other one. [00:09:43.710]
If you’re not familiar with Steam, you probably don’t play enough games, but it’s called Half Life Alex and it’s making around $50 million quarter. I specifically tried to stay away from games because I think social virtual worlds and how we transact at that level feels newer than talking about buying virtual goods in World Warcraft or something like that. But there’s a lot more here to come. I really wanted just to talk about these ones today and there are some others that are still immature, like the legal Services lawcity.com which is providing legal services within the virtual worlds, within the Metaverse. But I will update this video on a semi regular basis because it’s currently August 2022 and I think even by March next year. [00:10:15.400]
I think we’re going to see some big differences here, so I hope you found that interesting. You’ve got some things to go and research more now. I’ll just put up on the screen the layout that I use when I’m mapping out with clients, revenue streams for virtual worlds and metaverse. And just a reminder, you have to start as you mean to go on. Introducing these things when you have an established user base is going to be extremely difficult. [00:11:17.170]
Think about how people are responding to Netflix introducing advertising today, or think about if
Facebook tried to bring in a subscription model. I think we all know that it’s harder to change things later on, easier to do them upfront and having thought about them. I will see you in the next video. If you lose me and can’t find my stuff online, go to meta verse mentor.com au. That’s where I’m throwing everything up on the screen at the moment. [00:11:42.510]
Thank you for your time. Bye. [00:12:11.250]
RESOURCES:
https://www.metaversegroup.com/
https://www.gq.com/story/making-money-in-the-metaverse
https://events.decentraland.org/
https://www.statista.com/topics/2532/virtual-reality-vr/#dossierKeyfigures
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/blog/top-10-vr-games-by-revenue