I wrote for Naavik about Voodoo’s $500M acquisition of BeReal. Read the full article here.
Why I wrote about this
This was a perfect opportunity to look deeper into Voodoo. It’s easy to forget that Voodoo is not just a hypercasual publisher, and that it business lines such as social networknig that are not related to mobile games at all.
The gist of it
Voodoo is acquiring BeReal in a deal valued at up to $500M, with $166M paid in cash and the rest tied to performance earnouts. BeReal reportedly has 40M active users and 125M lifetime downloads, but no revenue. Assuming roughly 30M DAUs, Voodoo is effectively paying between ~$5.50 and ~$16.70 per DAU, depending on whether earnouts are included. It’s not outrageous, but far from trivial for an app with zero monetization.
Short term, the plan is clear: monetize and professionalize. Voodoo is installing leadership from Wizz, its teenage dating app that generates meaningful revenue despite a smaller audience. The playbook will likely involve faster iteration and disciplined monetization. That said, extracting even low single-digit annual revenue per DAU from BeReal won’t be easy given its minimalist, low-engagement format.
Medium to long term, this is about building a scaled consumer app portfolio and an ad machine. In a post-IDFA world, owning large first-party audiences is strategic gold. If Voodoo can combine social apps, utility apps, and games under a unified data infrastructure, it positions itself less as a hypercasual publisher and more as an ad-driven consumer platform. This kind of story commands much higher IPO multiples.
Key takeaways
- Voodoo is paying for audience, not revenue and betting that it can fix monetization.
- Owning large first-party audiences is increasingly strategic in a post-IDFA ecosystem.
- This deal supports a broader pivot from game publisher to scaled consumer app platform.