bereal

BeReal raised $60M in its Series B earlier this year, now has 20M DAUs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Apps, bereal, funding, Social, social media, StartupsNo Comments

BeReal, the photo-sharing app, has been a huge hit with Gen Z and beyond. Now with other big social apps rushing to clone some of its no-frills ethos, it’s put together a war chest to work on its next chapter. ZebethMedia has learned that the startup closed a round of $60 million earlier this year. The funding is coming in the form of a Series B and it values Paris, France–based BeReal at a valuation north of €600 million — which at today’s exchange rates is just under $587 million. (Exchange rates are tricky right now; the dollar is strong against other currencies in the face of global economic turmoil. When the Information first reported on some of the details of this round, it noted the premoney valuation of around $600 million. The size of the round had not previously been reported.) A source tells us that the company now has around 20 million DAUs. As a point of reference, the Information noted that the app had 7.9 million users as of July of this year. The numbers appear to indicate that despite efforts from competing social apps to reproduce the core of the BeReal experience — a two-photo set taken from a user’s front and back phone cameras, to be shared with friends at the same time each day — it ain’t nothing like the real thing, so to speak. The numbers are still only a small fraction of the users the world’s biggest social apps are attracting, but the velocity of BeReal’s growth, and its traction with the key demographic of young adults, have been strong fillips for those other apps to pay attention to how they can bring the same kind of experience into their own platforms. Others that have cloned the app include TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. (We’re not including the now-defunct FrontBack in the list.) Founded in 2019 by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, BeReal began to take off in earnest earlier this year, as its Gen Z user base sent the app climbing the App Store charts. In April, app intelligence firm Apptopia reported BeReal had grown its installs by 315% year to date. BeReal itself is simple to use: once a day, it sends users a notification encouraging them to take a dual photo, or a “BeReal” — a combination of a selfie and a front-facing photo, snapped simultaneously. This experience intends to provide its users with a more authentic photo feed compared with the curated aesthetic found on Instagram. And the photos themselves disappear after 24 hours. The app’s appeal attracted a range of investors, culminating in a $30 million Series A, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel in June 2021. When the Information reported on the Series B earlier this year, it was said to be valuing the app at $100 per daily active user. As one of our sources described it to us, yes, the world of consumer apps has had a lot of examples of early juggernauts fizzling out (sad waves to YikYak, Peach, Yo and the rest). But in relative terms, BeReal’s fast growth and how it seemed to capture attention among a certain group of users made it enough of an interesting bet at this stage. It also came at a time when the app was reaching mainstream awareness — as apparent by the fact that it was the subject of an SNL skit in October. The big question now is how BeReal plans to use the funding and what its next moves might be to evolve its product. The app today has no business model, though the FT said it may be considering subscriptions. Data provided by Sensor Tower this month also found that, despite some 53 million lifetime installs, only 9% of BeReal users on Android were opening the app daily. This doesn’t correlate to real-world usage, though, because more of BeReal’s core user base — younger Gen Z users in the U.S. — tend to use iPhones.

BeReal tops 53M installs, but only 9% open the app daily, estimates claim • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in Apps, bereal, Social, social mediaNo Comments

Gen Z social media app BeReal encourages its users to take a photo every day — a format designed to create a daily habit. But only a small number of the app’s users are currently doing so, new estimates from a third-party app intelligence firm indicate. According to research from Sensor Tower, BeReal is demonstrating significant traction across some metrics — it topped 53 million worldwide installs across the App Store and Google Play and has seen its monthly active users jump by 2,254% since January 2022, for example. But only 9% of its active Android installs are opening the app every day as of the third quarter of this year, it found. Active users are a better indication of an app’s adoption than downloads as many people will install an app out of curiosity to check it out, but then abandon the app if they don’t end up enjoying the experience. On this front, BeReal is still trailing established social media giants, Sensor Tower says. Today, 9% of BeReal’s active installs on Android (users who downloaded the app and are actively using it) are now launching the app daily. That’s far behind Instagram and TikTok. Instagram leads this category with 39% of its active installs opening the app every day, while TikTok comes in second with 29%. This is followed by Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Twitter at 27%, 26%, 20% and 18%, respectively. To be fair, as a newer app, BeReal adoption on Android may not be at the same pace as on iOS. And with many of its new installs being from young people in the U.S. — where iOS is preferred — this may not present a full picture of the app’s current usage. In addition, the report noted BeReal could improve this figure as it has continued to grow its monthly active users at a steady pace. Reached for comment, Sensor Tower declined to provide an exact figure for its monthly active user estimates (MAUs), however, only the percentage growth of 2,254% since Jan. 2022. We should note that these sorts of estimates are not an exact science. For example, another mobile app data firm, 42matters, estimated BeReal’s MAUs on Android were only up by 633% this year, growing from 43,899 MAUs in January to 321,787 MAUs by August 2022. This discrepancy between Sensor Tower’s data could be attributed to the fact that September was a huge month for the app, which would have impacted these estimates — and Sensor Tower had estimated through September. However, both firms more closely agreed on the number of installs the app has seen, with 42matters estimating the BeReal app across iOS and Android had seen north of 51.1 million installs to date, while Sensor Tower came in around 53+ million. The former also estimated the app is now seeing roughly 500,000 new installs daily with the U.S. helping to drive that growth. Image Credits: Sensor Tower Sensor Tower data shows the U.S. has represented the majority of each month’s new installs, followed by the U.K. (except for September, when Brazil became the No. 2 source of new installs, with over 1 million downloads that month). September was also a sizable month for new installs, with 14.7 million downloads, up 20% from the 12.3 downloads seen in August. Although these figures indicate BeReal is moving out of “fad” status to become a part of some users’ daily routines, it hasn’t yet established itself as an app that’s able to drive as consistent usage as its competitors. At the same time, it’s dealing with copycatting from top social media apps like Instagram, Snapchat and now TikTok. In July, Instagram began experimenting with a BeReal clone called Dual Camera, and in August tested an IG Candid Challenges feature, also similar to BeReal. Snapchat also launched a BeReal copycat in August, but its Dual Camera offered a variety of different placement options for the selfie photo. More recently, TikTok introduced its BeReal knock-off TikTok Now, which is available as a standalone app in global markets outside the U.S., where it’s only an in-app feature for the time being. In time, these competitors could cut into BeReal’s growth potential, but so far that has not yet occurred. BeReal has not commented on the estimates.