Can BeReal Deliver On Its Promise?

For one, it’s one of the few social networks devoid of any advertising apparatus. In her newsletter piece about BeReal, Rachel Karten explores the question of branding within BeReal with the core question: do people even want brands on the app in the first place?

On BeReal, you friend people individually, and you lose nothing by missing a day or two of content. For some, the allure could even be the intimacy - that you can’t use it with more than a small group of friends.

BeReal collects little to no user data beyond pictures and location. There is no active search categorization or discovery. What is the ceiling of audience research?

Suddenly, being on a laptop in the middle of a work day is an act worthy of someone’s attention. Maybe they’ll see the picture and notice more than just you at work - a decoration in your house, a new haircut, an alarming error in a SQL query you wrote. We’re suddenly funneling attention into the parts of our lives that we would never even journal ... See more