BeReal had a moment. In 2022, the social media app that forces you to snap a photo or video within a two-minute window each day actually felt different. No algorithm manipulation. No endless scroll. No influencers performing for the camera. Just unfiltered reality, twice a day, whether you liked it or not.
Then something changed. The app’s growth flattened. Downloads dropped 41% year-over-year to 8.5 million in 2025, according to research firm Sensor Tower. The party was over. So now BeReal is doing what every struggling platform does: it’s chasing creators.
According to reporting from Business Insider’s CMO Insider, BeReal’s US managing director Ben Moore recently told the publication that the company has been actively pitching American creators to get verified and post more regularly. The company started this push in Q2 this year, building on earlier outreach efforts in France and Japan that helped establish relationships with bigger names like Inoxtag and Léna Situations.
The company insists it still has a loyal base. It claims 40 million monthly active users, with over 50% opening the app six days a week. That’s solid engagement, even if the total numbers feel small compared to TikTok or Instagram. But loyalty and growth are two different things, and growth is what investors care about.
The Monetization Problem
Here’s where things get complicated. BeReal doesn’t offer creators a direct revenue share or creator fund like other platforms. Instead, it’s positioning itself as a middleman between creators and brand advertisers, offering insights tools to help creators understand their audiences. The company has worked with over 500 advertisers including Amazon, Apple, and L’Oréal since launching ads.
Moore’s pitch to creators emphasizes that BeReal attracts a distinct demographic. Around 27% of US users don’t use Snapchat, 25% aren’t on Facebook, and 23% don’t have TikTok accounts. That’s a real audience advantage. But it’s also not particularly massive.
The real tension here is philosophical. BeReal was built on rejecting everything that makes platforms exhausting: algorithms, infinite scrolling, and the constant performance anxiety that comes with trying to look perfect. The appeal was radical simplicity. You take a photo when the app tells you to. That’s it.
But creators don’t want simplicity. They want reach. They want money. They want the tools to build an audience and monetize that attention. The moment BeReal starts seriously courting them, the entire premise starts to crack.
The Authenticity Trap
James Poulter, founder of digital transformation consultancy ThreePoint Labs, nailed this in his comments to Business Insider. “They set themselves out as the unfiltered, unedited, no-algorithm-in-sight social platform, but it’s exactly what breaks the moment creators start treating it as a monetization channel,” Poulter said. “Creators optimize for engagement, and then authenticity goes out the window, and you end up with a slightly less polished Instagram.”
That’s not hyperbole. It’s how these things work. Put money in the game, and people start gaming it. They’ll figure out the optimal times to post. They’ll curate what they share. They’ll optimize their “raw” content for engagement. The very thing that made BeReal appealing gets sacrificed on the altar of business.
Poulter also noted that BeReal would need to build more formal creator-brand matching mechanisms with transparent rates if it wants serious buy-in. Right now, the company is kind of hoping things work out organically. That’s not going to cut it when TikTok is offering creators millions and YouTube has decades of sophisticated creator infrastructure.
Simon Andrews, founder of digital marketing consultancy Addictive, was even more blunt. He suggested that BeReal could struggle to compete with larger platforms for creator attention. “Apps like BeReal feel like they are lost,” Andrews told Business Insider, “installed but nowhere near the first screen where people keep the apps they constantly use.”
The Real Stakes
This isn’t just about whether BeReal can compete with Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. It’s about whether the company can stay true to its original value proposition while simultaneously chasing the growth metrics that make investors happy. Those two goals might be fundamentally incompatible.
BeReal is hiring for a Paris-based head of growth to scale the platform globally. That hire signals where the company’s priorities are heading. Growth. Scale. The traditional playbook. But the traditional playbook is what created the toxic social media environment that made BeReal appealing in the first place.
The irony is that BeReal’s current user base might actually be valuable precisely because it’s smaller and more engaged. That’s a genuine differentiator. But smaller doesn’t impress investors, and investors fund platforms. So the pressure will keep mounting to chase creators, court advertisers, and optimize for engagement metrics.
Maybe BeReal can pull off the impossible and remain authentic while becoming a serious creator platform. More likely, it becomes a slightly different version of every other platform that tried to stay true to its roots and gradually compromised until nobody could remember what made it special in the first place.
