75 percent of Germans don’t know what the Metaverse is

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of renaming Facebook Meta triggered a bit of hype about the virtual parallel world – suddenly all well-known tech companies and entrepreneurs wanted to get back into the VR business. Metaverse projects like The sandbox or Decentraland from the soil. And Zuckerberg didn’t stop with the name change, which was probably also done for image reasons. The company is even working on its own digital payment system for the virtual parallel world “Horizon Worlds”.

Outside of the tech or crypto niche, however, the term seems to be little known. This is now also shown for Germany by a current one representative survey with 1,006 participants from the digital association Bitkom on behalf of the initiative “Digital for everyone”. Accordingly, 75 percent of Germans have never heard of the Metaverse. Only 4 percent believed they could explain the term.

The terms Blockchain and Web3 look a little better. After all, 13 percent of all respondents feel capable of explaining the technologies. Cloud computing and AI seem to be much more familiar to Germans. 55 percent and 52 percent respectively are familiar with the terms.

The latest Bitkom survey contradicts a recent study from May of this year Sort list. In it, the authors surveyed 1,000 participants in Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands. Surprisingly, 70 percent of Germans stated that they understood the metaverse.

In order to create a better understanding of digital topics, the initiative is calling for the “nationwide Digital Day” on June 24th. Managing Director Anna-Lena Hosenfeld explains:

The metaverse is still unknown to many people. To make the buzzwords of digitization understandable for everyone, we created the digital day – a day of action that makes it possible to discover and experience digitization in a very low-threshold way.

According to the Bitkom survey, understanding of the metaverse in Germany appears to be low.