BeReal gained significant attention and became a major social media app in 2022, attracting millions of users in 2023, and the numbers are counting. It becomes so popular because its different, it focused on enhancing the qualitative timeframe of social media use rather than the quantitative. Despite its simplicity, with an interface that showcases your friends’ daily posts without any ads or clutter, it seems that BeReal is still missing proper monetization.
It looks like BeReal is currently a loss-making company, and it may be making more money in the future. But, for now, it seems they are not earning much.
How Does BeReal Meet Its Expenses?
Depending on Private Investments
The app itself does not generate revenue. BeReal relies on private investments to sustain its operations and employ staff members who work on maintaining and improving the technology. This is a common approach taken by many social media and tech companies during their early stages. But how do they make these private investments come to fruition? And that’s where we discuss the marketing skills of its product development team.
Marketing efficiently
BeReal began as a free app in 2020, BeReal employed marketing programs to spread the word about its unique and authentic take on social media. The narrative they spread was different than what we already knew about social media. This strategy proved successful, enabling the app to rapidly amass thousands and eventually millions of enthusiastic users who embraced its distinctive approach.
Is Not Making Money Sustainable for BeReal?
Remaining unprofitable indefinitely is not a sustainable path for BeReal or any company. While the company has not disclosed its specific monetization plans, its website focuses on enhancing the product rather than exploring potential revenue streams. That way their product really improves to a better standard. Nonetheless, there are several possibilities that could be considered for BeReal to generate revenue in the future.
Plans to Generate Revenue By BeReal
Advertisements
One potential avenue is incorporating advertisements within the home feed, similar to what is observed on multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. By introducing such ads between friends’ daily posts, BeReal could establish a revenue stream to support its growth. Although advertisements can sometimes be perceived as bothersome, they are already an accepted feature of social media for most users, However, some reports also show that BeReal right now is unwilling to run advertisements, but is interested in bringing paid features.
Paid feature
Another possibility is adopting a paid subscription model, following in the footsteps of major social media giants like Instagram and Facebook, which have introduced paid subscriptions offering enhanced features (e.g., Meta Verified). These subscriptions provide additional benefits to users and generate revenue for the companies without resorting to more advertisements. According to Mashable, BeReal might be considering the introduction of a similar paid subscription model.
The app could offer supplementary features for a fee, similar to other popular social media subscriptions like Twitter Blue or Meta Verified which charges $8 per month. By implementing this subscription model, BeReal could generate income without resorting to intrusive advertising. The specific pricing and features associated with the paid subscription would need to be determined, potentially allowing users to enjoy enhanced interactions with friends’ posts and an overall improved user experience, provided there is sufficient interest from users to subscribe.
Selling of user data
Generally, selling the user data such as their emails and phone numbers is very common in the tech industry. I remember when I signed up for a web hosting company once and booked a domain. And, from the next day, I have been receiving calls and emails from Web development companies. That clears that the web hosting company sold my data to their alliance companies.
So, selling user data is common, and BeReal might think on doing so as data is important, and costs a lot. By doing so, companies can generate revenue for themselves. For instance, Snapchat collects personal data for advertising purposes and shares it with select third parties. However, currently, BeReal’s Privacy Policy states that it does not sell user data for commercial purposes. However, this stance could change if the company decides to explore avenues for generating revenue in the future.
Brand Challenges
Getting traction in social media has a lot to do with the current trends and which directions are these trends going. Many social media giants collaborate with their creators and brands and come up with a sustainable model to support challenges. Once these challenges spread like wildfire then the app starts to get a lot of traffic and engagement from the public.
Integration with another giant
BeReal on the other hand can be the next Instagram or Giphy. It can be true that many people are working on their product when the product they made has become the giant that it is being sold at a very durable price to another company. For Example, Facebook bought Instagram, WhatsApp, and many more such apps which had gone popular.
We all know the same script in the case of other startups that got makers a wholesome amount. But there is a catch here, plans such as these do not fruition easily as we expect them to turn out and this is a fundamental issue and a problem. Regulatory authorities often penalize deals of these sorts and keep a keen eye on monetary transactions and buying and selling of Tech companies.
Ballooning Valuation
Valuation itself is not a standard product of monetization but it attracts more investors and further opens the company to build up a new revenue model. As far as news sources are concerned, there have been talks about Valuation getting bigger in the app. Though the company is still not in the public domain to officially release papers regarding the valuation. But there are estimates available that place the company at a valuation of $150 million. The last seed funding that they got was a total of $30 million. BeReal is ripe now for any form of investment. They can also now sell their company at a very reasonable price to others and might get some money out of it.
Conclusion
BeReal is not monetized hence it does not have an exact source of money. BeReal is planning to monetize its application much like other applications. News still run in the air that they are not considering advertising as a potential revenue-generating add-on to their platform. Nor they are willing to sell data or introduce brand challenges. As of now, BeReal is only concerned about expanding its reach and using a subscription model to monetize the expenses of the platform.
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