Just BeReal Why simple can be better for social (and beyond)

The battle for consumer attention is more competitive than ever in today’s saturated entertainment economy. Free time is saturated, and ever more competitive propositions are constantly bringing in new features, new content, and new ideas for audiences to engage with and enjoy. 

To stand out, there are two main focus points: quality (and quantity) of content, and ways to engage. Standalone platforms with professionally licensed content (like music and video streaming) dominate the content space, while user-generated social content platforms are more likely to be introducing share features or marketing tools to engage with audiences for the latter focus. However, as social platforms continue to eat up more time and introduce more ‘formal’ entertainment-like features (such as TikTok’s rumoured music offering, and YouTube spanning the gamut from Shorts to long-form, on-platform films), they are increasingly becoming a threat to more traditional forms of entertainment. This is especially true as creative behaviours become more prominent, and social is increasingly a given in the digital realm.  

Meanwhile, social platforms, like Tiktok and Instagram, are going for the ‘more is more’ approach, constantly adding features and tweaking the user experience to be more dynamic and to adopt competitors’ ideas to retain those audiences on-platform, rather than having them go elsewhere. While broader entertainment will increasingly have to compete with social, even for social apps to compete among each other is a difficult, long-term, strategic battle.

To combat the growing overload of complexity on different apps and platforms, the introduction of simplicity is seemingly more of an appealing option – something that streaming platforms and entertainment of all types can count as a boon, rather than simply to compete on the same levels as everything else. Enter BeReal. 

BeReal is simple in every way that Instagram is complex. It asks for a single photo per day, so that every user of the app can see their friends’ photos.It is friend-first, and without filters or any kind of incentive to be showy or provocative. It also does not attempt to keep users on-platform for long periods of time, making it undemanding in a digital environment where users are constantly being demanded of so much at all times. Launched in 2020, with simplicity as its key focus, the undemanding experience of the app stands out; its growth was impressive at launch, especially among younger consumers (at 2% overall consumer penetration, BeReal is still an edge case for the mainstream, though the limited data available suggests that it resonates disproportionately with younger consumers). 

BeReal has seemingly suffered user losses in recent months, although it does so alongside stagnating user growth for other social platforms; attention saturation is hurting all players in the space. While the upstart app is, perhaps, not the next new social hub of the internet (it could, for example, have done more to incorporate new features and keep its offering fresh for audiences used to the rapid-fire pace of innovation, without losing its core proposition), it does offer a window into new consumer preferences in the face of the hyper-competitive digital clutter with which they are faced. 

The solution to clutter is not to add more things into the mix. In contrast, simplicity of purpose and a clean user experience is increasingly appealing to users. As we enter into an AI-content saturated web 3.0, all entertainment companies should look to focus on what they do best for their users, to stand out from the crowd rather than jostle with it.  

Roles

This report is relevant to the following roles:

Audience Insight