BeReal's new owner, Voodoo Games, quickly introduced ads to the social-media app after acquiring the company in June.
Many of BeReal's users are not impressed.
Since the app switched on ads at the turn of this month, BeReal users have flocked to leave negative reviews on its App Store and Google Play pages.
"Was great before. Now new greedy owners adding loads of sponsored posts and ads. Completely ruins the app. Takes away the friend aspect and creates another money grabbing app," read one review posted on July 9.
"Used to like it as a social thing where I wasn't being marketed at. Now there is an ad every other picture. Deleting," read another, published July 19.
Users on social platforms like X and Reddit have also voiced complaints about the quality, quantity, and repetitiveness of ads they're now seeing on the BeReal app.
"Are any of y'all getting the most suspicious ads on bereal," posted one user to the r/bereal_app subreddit. "Like oh my god I only get really bad anime ones."
A spokesperson for BeReal declined to comment.
Launched in 2020, BeReal soared in popularity during the pandemic. Its simple premise was to alert users at a random time daily to take a photo of themselves and what they were doing within a two-minute window. It billed itself as "not another social network" and didn't initially carry ads.
But its popularity has waned. In the first half of 2024, the app's downloads were down 55% versus the prior year, and its monthly active users had declined 3% since December, according to Sensor Tower data.
Having struggled to drum up investor interest for a Series C funding round and coming close to running out of funding, BeReal was sold to French gaming company Voodoo in a cash and stock deal that it said valued the app at 500 million euros.
Voodoo CEO Alexandre Yazdi told Business Insider at the time that he aimed to quadruple its daily active user number to 100 million within the next two years. He also said the app would quickly introduce more features and ads.
"Advertising is a proven model for social networks, and subscriptions is not," Yazdi said in an interview with Business Insider last month. "So we really believe we could be well suited to integrate an authentic format of ads that are perfectly integrated in the feed. Right. So it's a no-brainer to do that ASAP. "
Paul Armstrong, a technology advisor at the consulting and media company TBD Group, said some users see aggressive advertising as a betrayal of BeReal's original ad-free ethos and that it risks alienating its core user base.
"A 'rip the Band-Aid' strategy can work, but retraining users to expect a poorer experience doesn't have a lot of case studies for long-term success or user happiness under its belt — ask the dating app industry and see how it is flexing," Armstrong said.
Voodoo is currently recruiting for three BeReal ad sales roles in France and New York. The job ads hint that the company wants to target big budgets from the major advertising holding companies.
Separately, Voodoo recently laid off 28 BeReal employees across its engineering, quality assurance, and marketing teams, PocketGamer first reported. BeReal Chief Operating Officer Romain Salzman said on LinkedIn that the app was refocusing on "France/Europe-based talents."
