CEO of Instagram (NASDAQ:META) Adam Mosseri is shifting from San Francisco to London in an effort to bolster parent firm Meta’s efforts to draw users away from TikTok, which is experiencing a decline in usage. Mosseri will temporarily relocate to London later this year, a representative for Meta confirmed.
London is Meta’s largest engineering location outside of the United States, with over 4,000 workers, including a dedicated Instagram (NASDAQ:META) product team and jobs focused on developing creator-centric services. It is also where the Workplace messaging app was initially created. Meta (MASDAQ:META) stated that Mosseri will assist the company’s creator team in London, which is focused on assisting select users to monetize their postings and combating TikTok’s meteoric development. The corporation is aiming to rebrand itself as a collection of platforms that enable e-commerce in an online realm known as the metaverse as opposed to merely a digital targeting tool for advertisers.
Meta (NASDAQ:META) has failed to persuade investors of its move to the metaverse, with shares of the business falling more precipitously than Big Tech counterpart Alphabet amid a larger decline in tech markets, and as its apps lose ground to Chinese-owned TikTok. The company’s second-quarter revenue fell for the first time ever, and the company’s projections for the third quarter were gloomy. Its incursion into the metaverse has been expensive, with the virtual reality division losing $2.8 billion from April to June.
Meta has attempted to imitate TikTok’s explosive growth by modifying its own apps, including the addition of a short-video function called Shorts. Additionally, the business made controversial adjustments to Instagram (NASDAQ:META), giving algorithmically generated content precedence over posts from friends. The action was met with opposition from users, including Kim Kardashian.
Mosseri’s action could be interpreted as an attempt to win over British regulators. Through a new law called the Online Safety Bill, the government intends to provide the media watchdog Ofcom expanded authority over Instagram (NASDAQ:META) and other social media platforms. However, the bill’s advancement has been hampered by the resignation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the following search for a replacement.
It also indicates a bigger push by Meta (NASDAQ:META) towards remote labor. In the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (NASDAQ:META) stood out as one of Silicon Valley’s chief proponents of telecommuting. In 2020, he began enabling certain staff to work permanently from home, subsequently expanding the policy to include all employees. Additionally, the company developed an application called Horizon Worlds that enables team meetings to be held using virtual reality headsets.
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