Nov 13, 2025

Make the Most of Holiday Trends

The holiday season is officially here, which means users are spending more time and money across Meta Horizon, and there are more opportunities to grow your worlds and apps. The focus now isn’t whether people are active, but how you’ll stand out and earn their attention.

Higher consumer spending, coupled with Meta Horizon’s vast library of great apps and worlds, means that you’re competing for people’s time, attention, and money (along with countless other industries).

Time spent hits its annual highs about two weeks after Christmas, but between Black Friday sales and new players entering the ecosystem between now and Christmas, time spent is rising, and it can feel like everyone’s either launching content, having a sale, and wondering the same thing: how do I make my experience stand out?

To put it simply: you have a lot going on. That’s why last month, we took a closer look at the North American holiday schedule and shared how strategically-timed and well-designed in-game events can keep your audience tuned in during the busiest times of the year.

Today, our goal is to help you cut through the noise by revealing the patterns that you can count on, and the tips and tools to capitalize on them. Dive in below to discover more key trends and ways to optimize your strategy this holiday season.

Time Spent: When the Temperature Falls, Activity Heats Up

In looking at trends after more than a decade in the industry, the data tells a clear story: time spent increases during the northern hemisphere winter holidays, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Like we mentioned earlier, time spent peaks about two weeks after Christmas when everyone’s unwrapping new headsets. This post-Christmas spike is when both free apps with in-app purchases and paid apps can thrive.

From our data we know that time spent is highly correlated with entitlement growth, and that intuitively makes sense; People are spending more time in worlds and in VR, both in-headset and on mobile. That means they’re exploring new experiences and looking at expanding their content library. Ultimately, these behaviors create more opportunities for you to get discovered, sell your app, and additional drive purchases within your experience.

In short: the two weeks after Christmas can be lucrative. And even better yet, this period is just one part of the season when you can prepare for more spending and downloads. Before diving into our next section, take a look at the graphs below to get a better idea of time spent patterns across paid apps and free apps with IAP (in-app purchases).

Black Friday to New Year: The Two-Month Boom

The North American winter holiday season is a bit like a double feature when it comes to entitlements .

PART 1

The first showing is Black Friday (end of November), which consistently drives one of the highest weeks for app entitlements across both paid and free-to-play apps. For free apps with IAP, it’s also the third-strongest week of the year as players stock up on discounts and explore new pre-holiday releases. Shoppers are already in deal-hunting mode, making Meta Horizon a platform primed for value-driven discovery and spending.

PART 2

The second part of the double feature is the post-Christmas window, when newly-gifted Meta Quest headsets get activated. In the two weeks following Christmas, these activations help fuel a 1.5x boost to entitlements for paid apps and free apps with IAP. Hardware sales follow a similar pattern, making December and January key months for new users exploring the Meta Horizon Store and Horizon Feed.

Many people also receive gift cards or have a little extra spending money after Christmas to splurge on new devices and apps. Even before the holidays arrive, some eager shoppers may proactively download the Meta Horizon app to browse and wishlist experiences ahead of their purchase.

Understanding these cycles can help you plan marketing, launches, and promotions with confidence. That’s why we recommend taking an even deeper dive into user trends by reading our blog post on app discovery from earlier this year.

The graphs below can help you understand predictable entitlement patterns throughout the year for both paid apps and free apps with IAP.

What To Expect This Season

More engagement and spending from consumers goes hand in hand with increased activity across our developer and creator communities. In addition to some of the mobile and VR surface redesigns we’ve made recently, we’re doubling down on money-generating features, campaigns, and competitions to help you build momentum heading into 2026.

This year we’re planning:

Competitions that challenge developers and creators to learn, experiment, and publish experiences right in time for the holidays are live! The Meta Horizon Creator Competition: Mobile Innovation ends on December 8th and the Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition 2025 ends on December 9th. Both have $1.5 million prize pools, so be sure to enter for a chance to win big.

New Winter Clothing Templates that creators can leverage to make fun, seasonal avatar customizations and earn extra revenue. You can find all clothing templates in the creator portal. As a reminder, we will be leaning into two themes (holiday gala and winter rush) for our wearables collection and other, earnable rewards.

More Ways to Share It’s a great opportunity to distribute your content and engage with users beyond Meta Horizon to grow your community. Share your avatar on Instagram stories, link your items anywhere, and capture video content from within your world using the “record your world feature” in the Worlds Desktop Editor (coming soon) to produce high-quality, professional-looking social content, then share it as a Reel on Instagram.

New Merchandising Tools to reach and engage as many potential buyers as possible. Cross-team bundles enable different developer organizations to group apps together for heightened visibility and added value, while our new re-engagement tool enables you to send unique promo codes to people who have wishlisted content and incentivize purchases.

Meta-initiated holiday Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and promotions that you can opt-in to via the Developer Dashboard if eligible.

These updates get you more eyes from your existing audience and potential buyers so you can make the most of the holiday spikes, but getting good results also involves strategic timing. Historically, we’ve seen some of our most popular apps experience a lift in time spent when app updates align with the winter peak season.

And last year was proof that even timely short-term changes can have a big impact. In Worlds, the top-selling items from mid-December through the end of the year were holiday-themed in-world purchases and clothing items. Creators are already building holiday-themed assets and designing in-game events to make the most of increased IAP activity during the season.

We covered key seasonal patterns and how we’re helping you grow this holiday season. Now it’s time to share what you can do to get the best results.

Holiday Checklists: Smart Moves for Better Results

So how can you turn these insights into an actual strategy? We’ve put together checklists for creators and developers that contain steps, tools, and best practices you can leverage to make the most of seasonal traffic. Click below to open and download your applicable checklist:

Developer (Meta Horizon OS) checklist

Creator (Worlds) checklist

Stay Tuned In For More Insights

The winter holidays are busy, but investing efforts into optimizing your marketing and capitalizing on increased user engagement and spending now can help you build a launchpad to make 2026 even better.

Whether you’re fine-tuning an existing world, launching a new app, or launching new in-app content, what’s important stays the same: plan and execute around times with increased activity, leverage the latest monetization features and tools at your disposal, and lean into predictable patterns.

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