BeReal plans to let brands and celebrities join, starting on February 6, and says the app now has 23M DAUs, up from 20M DAUs in August 2023
BeReal, a rising social media app that emphasizes authenticity, is making its first outreach to brands and celebrities.
Context & Ripple Effects
BeReal had previously explored paid features as an alternative to advertising, while product changes such as its shift from Discovery to Friends of Friends kept the service centered on social connections. Opening participation to commercial and public figures is a meaningful expansion of who can use that network.
The reported 23 million daily users also follows conflicting company-reported audience milestones, including a claim of more than 25 million daily users months earlier. That makes the new figure useful as a directional signal of scale, but not a clean growth series.
First-order effects
- Brands and celebrities gain a new official route onto BeReal from February 6, giving the app a distinct participant class beyond ordinary users.
- BeReal must integrate those accounts without undermining the friend-focused experience it has been refining, while its reported daily audience becomes the immediate pitch to prospective partners.
Second-order effects
- Marketers and talent teams can test whether BeReal’s format supports organic presence before committing to broader paid promotion, creating pressure for the platform to define account treatment and measurement.
- Existing users may reassess the app’s authenticity proposition as more professional accounts appear; their engagement will determine whether the expansion strengthens reach or creates friction.
Third-order effects
- If commercial participation is accepted without weakening retention, BeReal could move from a deliberately constrained social product toward a hybrid consumer-and-marketer platform, widening its eventual monetization options.
- The key structural tension is whether social platforms built around intimacy can add institutional participants while preserving the scarcity and trust that differentiated them.
The trend: BeReal is part of a broader push by newer social platforms to convert concentrated user engagement into commercial participation without immediately abandoning their core product identity.