Meta’s head of e-commerce and fintech, Stephane Kasriel, announced that the company will drop support for NFTs. Collectible NFTs have been able to be used as profile pictures or shared on Facebook and Instagram since the middle of last year, but that option doesn’t seem to have caught the interest of enough users.
Change of focus
Kasriel says that from now on, Meta will focus more on the technologies they see as a priority, i.e. they will increase their focus on only a few of them. NFTs are not, and Facebook and Instagram will find new ways to support their private and business users and content creators. Among the other ways to make money on these platforms, he highlighted the monetization of content, for example in short videos (Reels).
Some product news: across the company, we're looking closely at what we prioritize to increase our focus. We’re winding down digital collectibles (NFTs) for now to focus on other ways to support creators, people, and businesses. 🧵[1/5]
— Stephane Kasriel (@skasriel) March 13, 2023
In the future, the Meta Pay service will be further developed, it will facilitate digital payments, and it will enable the transfer of money to contacts via messages on all Meta platforms. NFTs, therefore, never took off as a way of monetizing content, they didn’t become popular even as profile pictures, so Meta decided, after a few months of the trial period, to close that chapter.
The world market of NFTs flourished during 2020, and high activity continued in part of 2021, after which the interest of buyers fell by about 90%.
