Why BeReal won't last much longer
Why BeReal won't last much longer
Being "anti-instagram" has its faults
With the tagline, “Your Friends for Real” BeReal promises to take away all the fakeness and bring back authenticity in social media.
As of August, BeReal has 21.6 million monthly active users since being released in 2020.
They have received $30 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, and secured an additional $85 million led by Yuri Milner's DST Global, increasing its valuation to $600 million.
In mid 2022, it became the #1 downloaded app in the app store in the U.S. for social networking. Downloads have grown 315%, with 65% of these lifetime downloads happening in the Q1 2022.
And people are responding positively towards that idea, especially zoomers being majority of the users.
Society is tired of the influencer lifestyle
BeReal wouldn’t be so popular if there wasn’t a demand for authenticity.
There was already a wave of unfiltered carousel photo dumps and finstas on instagram where people were more of their real selves.
But nothing that you see online can be taken for what it is.
Your favorite IG model? Plastic surgery, lipo, and extreme photoshop.
Those prank videos on Youtube? Staged with paid actors.
Fake money, fake jewelry, fake stories, and especially fake relationships are all over these social apps designed to make you feel worse about yourself.
“It literally is a point now where we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works with short form dopamine feedback loops. And if you feed that beast, the beast will destroy you.”
- Chamath Palihapitiya, early senior executive at Facebook.
The result of going away from this online culture that has taken over for the past ten years is a social feed of unedited photos of people doing everyday, and almost boring things.
The main difference from other social apps
Where other apps want your non-stop attention, BeReal only wants it one time per day.
Once a day, at a random time, the app notifies users that it's "time to BeReal" and everyone is supposed to post at the same time.
When you open the app, a two-minute timer appears at the top, giving them a limited amount of time to take a photo of whatever they're doing at that given moment.
Promoting itself as “not another social network” and “the anti-instagram” can appeal to certain people and give a breath of fresh air from all the glamorous lifestyles and highlights that people try to portray, but it gives off an uncomfortable truth for most of us.
That real life is boring.
And whether it’s real or not, people don’t want boring when they use social media as an escape from their reality.
While we're shifting away from online perfection, it’s human nature for people to always compare themselves to others.
All it’ll take is for one BeReal post to show your friends at an enviable destination and then comes the game of jealousy and competition.
People, as well as brands on the app, will end up trying too hard to “be real” and when they do, people will see right through it.
Going against social nature
The most popular social apps have a few traits in common that make it fun to use, as well as addicting.
They let people be free
Every other social app lets you use it when you want, not when you’re told to.
But BeReal puts constraints on you with the one post per day at a time they choose, not you. It’s like calls on the house phone (if you’re old enough to remember those) where you have to pick up with the anxiety of not knowing who’s on the other line.
With their 2-minute timer that can pop anytime during the day, causing people to stop everything they’re doing and scrambling to get the decent light, presentable background, and take an acceptable selfie in those 2 minutes.
What kind of app experience would it be if the alert goes off before or after you do something exciting?
People want to show off what makes them look good, not always what’s real.
In the book Contagious, Jonah Berger goes in-depth on why people share things in the first place.
People care about how they look to others. They want to seem smart, cool, well-informed, and show things that have some type of value.
So when people share their life on social media, they want to represent themselves well.
And the same goes in real life. For example, if someone’s room is a mess, they might be ok living with it for a few days or weeks. But the moment someone is coming over, they clean their room to not appear like a slob.
If they put ads onto the platform… 🤮
Another topic surrounding BeReal is how are they going to monetize?
Investors don’t give you millions of dollars without expecting much more in return.
Most social apps monetize in two different ways, ads or selling users’ personal data. An app like BeReal seems like the last place where ads should be shown.
I mean, how “real” can a brand promotion really be?
So it seems revenue will be limited to selling personal data, which most people don’t appreciate.