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Writer's pictureJoe Andrews

Speaking of: How You Monetize BeReal

You can't.

I'm sure someone with a much greater financial incentive than myself to solve this problem could figure it out, but I see no path to this being a sustainable business without the platform fundamentally changing to no longer be BeReal.

For content consumption platforms like BeReal, there are really only three business models I can think of that work: ad sales, subscription, and data mining.

BeReal is not optimized for ad sales. The entire premise of BeReal is, "Let's make a super low-engagement social media platform that you really don't want to spend that much time on." Nothing is less sexy to advertisers than that. Advertisers flock towards high-engagement websites and apps like moths to a lantern. I can't imagine there being any sizable ad market for a platform that I bet the average person spends no more than one minute a day on.

Subscription is proving to be a much more sustainable business model for practically any web-based service now, but is anyone going to subscribe to BeReal for literally any amount of money? Maybe people would pay a dollar a month for it, and maybe that would be enough to cover server costs and app development. But if you want to see photos of your friend David eating his morning tofu scramble, you could just use a freaking group chat for free. I can't see them commanding a significant amount of money for this service.

And what data could BeReal possibly be mining from you? Maybe it's secretly tracking your location and has read all your texts and has your entire web history memorized and maybe I'm naive. But it seems to me like all the app can do right now is maybe see that you spent two seconds instead of one looking at Veronica making potato salad and deduce that maybe there's a chance you like mayonnaise? There just isn't enough unique content to engage with to really form a strong digital fingerprint of a person.

So we're left in a spot where the service isn't engaging enough to be ad-driven, isn't useful enough to command a subscription, and isn't intelligent enough to get any data on you. And solving for any of these problems probably just turns the app into Instagram. So what do you do?

I don't buy this as a business.

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