In a flagrant effort to try to keep up with the young ones, I have spent the past weeks experimenting with the social media platform BeReal. But what, ask those who aren’t rolling their eyes in my direction, is BeReal? It’s a social media app billed as the anti-Instagram, developed in 2020 by two Frenchmen, Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau, which has been enjoying a surge of interest in recent months.
The app is basically a sharing platform where, following a daily alert, users must take a selfie on their phone within two minutes. The app then utilises the camera’s double-facing function so that the resulting selfie is set into a broader portrait of what you’re doing at the time. Part game, part scrapbook, part communication tool, the app has been downloaded more than 28mn times and now has more than 15mn daily users, of whom the vast majority are described as being from Gen Z.
This spring, the platform raised funding of $30mn, at a valuation reported to be around $600mn, comparatively small in the scheme of things. BeReal’s growth has rattled the millennial Instagram, however, and the Meta-owned photo-sharing app has launched a similar two-way functionality in an attempt to snatch back market share.