It’s time for Bereal to be authentic. It’s difficult to make a profit with a social photo sharing app without selling ads or memberships. Now, after leaving French mobile publisher Voodoo for 500 million euros, Bellaire is advertising in the US
That first product includes in-feed ads in the same dual camera post style as the app, as well as takeovers for the full-day brand. The app has already tested ads with companies like Levi’s, Nike, Netflix and Amazon, but is now launching a national advertising platform.
The company previously appointed Benmoor of Tiktok and led a US team focused on sales, partnerships and growth.
As they are trying to plead with advertisers, Bereal told TechCrunch that it has an estimated 40 million active users, including 5 million active users per month across the US. Bereal says 85% of users are Gen Z. The app claims that in the US, France and Japan, 50% of users are active six days a week in the best market. (TechCrunch could not independently verify these numbers.)
Today’s apps face challenges related to the competitive social landscapes of fashions coming and going.
Founded in 2019, the Erememeral Social App was unpopular until 2022 after securing a $30 million Series A round from the A16Z and Accel. Even Meta and Tiktok wanted to exploit Belia’s viral properties.
By October 2022, App Intelligence Firm Sensor Tower estimated that 53 million people had downloaded the app, but only about 9% of active Android users opened the app every day. The app hit a cultural milestone when it was parodied on SNL the same month.
Previously, Beereal has been downloaded 115 million times on iOS and Android, with 33% of these downloads coming from the US, but in the past few years, downloads have been slower from the moment of the virus. In 2023, there was an estimated 31.5 million downloads worldwide, and in 2024 it fell 60% year-on-year to 12.7 million.