6 ms·

Cameo was once valued at $1B

64 points by jawns 2y ago

grugagag 2y ago
Valuations, investors, squandered money, perhaps that was the whole plan from the begining, or it could be incompetence. Hope we’ll see less of this with high interest rates.
sgt_bilko 2y ago
Users included George Santos, but also Rudy Giuliani. Yuck. What a turnoff
- kej 2y ago
  A site like that is going to be a magnet for grifters, but there are plenty of not horrible people on there, too.
  - compootr 2y ago
    weren't jack black & jean norris (hank schrader) on there?
- xrd 2y ago
  I have to admit there is a certain price I would pay to get Giuliani to record a video in front of the Four Seasons gardening shop. I'm not sure what I would ask him to say, but I definitely would pay for something.
tbrownaw 2y ago
This sounds like they just don't have cash on hand but do have positive net worth still? Not sure how exactly a yet-another-marketplace-app company turns $100MM into something they can't sell to pay a fine tho.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  "positive net worth still" If its not in the bank, it does not exist. Trust me: I own a business. Me and a couple of mates have been doing it for 24 years. We have a slack handful of employees. We've had good and bad years. At the moment it is a bit bad. Bad to the point where we are down a bit on our personal remuneration. You cannot replace loss of profits with loans. I might allow that you can use loans to bridge a known and controlled, temporary ... issue. That's a form of gambling and ideally you own or can kick the house in the knackers. There are all sorts of exciting sounding ways of running up huge debts and messing around with funky sounding things like gearing ratios. Do remember that not everyone gets to be a unicorn or even tinkerbell and plenty of businesses crack on and work and survive without being particularly exciting. They also might happen to be rather stable in a rather unstable world. They just get on with it.
rhplus 2y ago
The math of the business model doesn’t really pass the napkin test. How many celebrities and sublebrities do you need to be actively booking 10s to 100s of videos per day to get enough revenue to justify a $1bn valuation? Perhaps that means $100m annual revenue. If Cameo is generously getting say $50/booking, that means 2 million videos per year! That’s 500 washed up sitcom stars each doing 10 happy birthday videos every single day for a year!
- saulpw 2y ago
  If they get 5000 sitcom stars doing 10 videos/day for 200 days/year and Cameo gets $10 each, that's 5000*200*10*10 = $100m. Those numbers seem at least napkin reasonable to me..
  - itake 2y ago
    200 * 10 = 2,000 videos per year per celeb. Is there really 2k customers each year every year trying to book a support character from a 1990s tv show?
    - moralestapia 2y ago
      I see the demand but not the supply. Most famous/rich celebrities would a 9-to-5 type of job, lol. For them to be worth it, it would have to be like 1-10k per video, which the average person wouldn't pay at all. Exhibit A, they're broke. But I do appreciate their short life, I got a real fun video from Flavor Flav out of it :D.
    - realityfactchex 2y ago
      Maybe not today, but get distribution of that back catalog right and everybody's happy? To great extent, people watch what is promoted to them as a trend, no?
  - bruce511 2y ago
    5000 sitcom stars? I'm not in the US but are there really that many? What's the qualification here? Some guy who had a random walk-on in season 5 episode 3? And you're thinking that 2000 people a year know about this random dudette? And will pay $50 for a cameo? If you think this is reasonable then do I have an opportunity for you. (And even if it was remotely possible thats income, not dividends.. )
bastawhiz 2y ago
I don't think this should be surprising. The celebrities that people would want are rich enough that they don't need to say happy birthday to your friends. The celebrities using Cameo are the ones who are broke, or don't want to do a toothpaste commercial, or who can't get work because they're politically extreme, or simply not popular enough to keep a steady stream of (insert whatever they usually do) going. Cameo stops being a good idea when the people doing the videos aren't exciting for the people who want the videos. We crossed that line years ago.
- excalibur 2y ago
  Cameo works great for people who aren't so dull that every celebrity they're interested in is a super-wealthy A-lister.
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    Agreed! If any of the celebrities they care to get videos from are on Cameo. Which, as it turns out, isn't really the case.
  - kbos87 2y ago
    Agree, I don't think product-market fit is the problem here. A lot of the takes here assume they need to attract top talent and they don't. There's a very long tail of popular-ish, C and D list celebrities who can command $50-$250 a video. There's a business that can work, though I agree it could never command the insane valuation it had at the peak. There's also a reasonably good likelihood that their costs aren't well managed.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      There is always two sides I am starting to think here. The size of the team working and if that is growing when it does not need to and is it in some over priced location. And then there is how much is being burned on marketing. I have not seen it for Cameo, but just looking at sponsorship deals in social media and one wonders is there really that much money in this single spot?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sackfield 2y ago
Does anyone know what this fine is about? It says celebrity endorsements but I'm not actually sure what the root issue is here?
- toomanyrichies 2y ago
  https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2024/attorney-general-james-secures-100000-cameo-over-misleading-videos https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2024/attorney-general-james-... "New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced a bipartisan, 30-state settlement with the owner of Cameo, Baron App Inc., for failing to ensure consumers knew that videos promoting products were paid endorsements... In 2020, Cameo... launched a service called Business Cameo that allows companies to pay celebrities to record videos endorsing their products. The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that Cameo failed to implement measures to ensure those videos were properly disclosed as paid endorsements, which violated endorsement rules issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and New York’s consumer protection laws."
- rasz 2y ago
  If I had to guess gambling/crypto endorsements framed as sincere/spontaneous messages.
TrackerFF 2y ago
This is one of those things that shouldn't have been a startup - at least not from the growth side of things. It's a nifty service that could thrive in the small/medium business side of things, but tech startup growth/scale and billion valuation - nah.
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  Maybe everything falls under that. It's taken as read that the goal is supposed to be explosive and/or exponential growth, global takeover and multi-billion valuations for everything from software frippery for getting a birthday video from the guy who voiced the cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch to chat apps and taxi bookings to hardware like phones, cars and ICs, industries like farming and mining and even services like banks. Is a monoculture of a few warring behemoths really the outcome that is ideal in the long run? At the human scale, it feels a bit like being a bystander (byfloater?) in a kayak during a nuclear naval battle. A bit like real ecology, an ecosystem is said to be thriving most when there's a diverse and dynamic mix, with nothing particularly dominating. Though of course the agricultural output of such an environment is lower than 10000 acres of monospecies wheat fields tended by 30-plus-ton tractors[1]. I wonder what a world would look like if it were disallowed for any company or ownership group to exceed a certain size. Economies of scale would maybe then be more acheivable though federation and cooperation rather than monopolism, lawfare and secrecy. And before libertarians start shouting or hiding under the bed, it's more a shower thought, rather then my personal NWO agenda. And I'm aware it would require more than national-level edicts. [1]: A problem in itself: https://resoilfoundation.org/en/agricultural-industry/dinosaurs-mechanical-threat-soil/ https://resoilfoundation.org/en/agricultural-industry/dinosa...
- kristopolous 2y ago
  That's the problem with tech startup culture. $10 million businesses get pumped and stretched to be $1 billion speculations and they collapse so now you don't have useful $10 million service any more. It's like demanding every car on the road must be modified to be a souped up sports car that goes 300 mph and you're totally willing to destroy the vehicle in the process. Many years from now people will look back at this and think "these people were insane."
gexla 2y ago
How did they not know about these requirements? I know this just by seeing the endorsement disclosures everywhere I see someone on video talking about a product. It's sort of like knowing that requirements for cookie usage is a thing just because you see the acceptance forms everywhere. Or that you could work out that stop signs are a thing because you see everyone stopping at them.
Simulacra 2y ago
This is sad to hear. I love Cameo. I've purchased half a dozen of the videos, for myself, and friends. I gleefully paid for a video of Joel Murray, talking about Bobcat Goldwaith while walking down the street in New Jersey. I imagine it probably gets old for the celebrities, but I felt really lucky to be able to pay for their time and ask them a question.
compootr 2y ago
https://archive.ph/Nwg1t https://archive.ph/Nwg1t
nanidin 2y ago
Cameo is in a great position to pivot to licensed generative AI cameos. They have the relationships with the celebrities that are willing to do it for money, and that seems like the hard part.
999900000999 2y ago
What a weird business. If you're popular enough people want to pay for a cameo, why not spin up your own service (I could probably do this in a weekend). Or literally just put your PayPal on your website and pinky promise to send a video in exchange for a hundred dollars or whatnot.
yamumsahoe 2y ago
fine line between gigs and jobs. turn gigs into jobs then it loses the fun factor.
- yamumsahoe 2y ago
  i mean it loses its stickiness. it becomes a fucking chore. gigs thrive on lack of structure. jobs thrive on structure, stability, consistency, reliability.
MediumD 2y ago
A lot of people saying the business model doesn't justify a $1bn valuation (rightfully so), but I'm guessing the valuation wasn't for their current business, but on the possibility that Cameo became the new way for booking talent in the age of the internet. They could have become a $1bn business if they had "revolutionized talent management" (or something like that). Not saying it was a good investment, or one I would have made, but I'm guessing they pitched a larger vision than simply a buttload of cameos from washed-up/reality TV stars.
whjkh 2y ago
[dead]
xnx 2y ago
If deepfakes haven't killed Cameo yet, the latest LivePortrait-class tools will.

64 points by jawns 2y ago

Valuations, investors, squandered money, perhaps that was the whole plan from the begining, or it could be incompetence. Hope we’ll see less of this with high interest rates.

sgt_bilko 2y ago

Users included George Santos, but also Rudy Giuliani. Yuck. What a turnoff

kej 2y ago
A site like that is going to be a magnet for grifters, but there are plenty of not horrible people on there, too.
- compootr 2y ago
  weren't jack black & jean norris (hank schrader) on there?
xrd 2y ago
I have to admit there is a certain price I would pay to get Giuliani to record a video in front of the Four Seasons gardening shop. I'm not sure what I would ask him to say, but I definitely would pay for something.

tbrownaw 2y ago

This sounds like they just don't have cash on hand but do have positive net worth still? Not sure how exactly a yet-another-marketplace-app company turns $100MM into something they can't sell to pay a fine tho.

gerdesj 2y ago
"positive net worth still" If its not in the bank, it does not exist. Trust me: I own a business. Me and a couple of mates have been doing it for 24 years. We have a slack handful of employees. We've had good and bad years. At the moment it is a bit bad. Bad to the point where we are down a bit on our personal remuneration. You cannot replace loss of profits with loans. I might allow that you can use loans to bridge a known and controlled, temporary ... issue. That's a form of gambling and ideally you own or can kick the house in the knackers. There are all sorts of exciting sounding ways of running up huge debts and messing around with funky sounding things like gearing ratios. Do remember that not everyone gets to be a unicorn or even tinkerbell and plenty of businesses crack on and work and survive without being particularly exciting. They also might happen to be rather stable in a rather unstable world. They just get on with it.

rhplus 2y ago

The math of the business model doesn’t really pass the napkin test. How many celebrities and sublebrities do you need to be actively booking 10s to 100s of videos per day to get enough revenue to justify a $1bn valuation? Perhaps that means $100m annual revenue. If Cameo is generously getting say $50/booking, that means 2 million videos per year! That’s 500 washed up sitcom stars each doing 10 happy birthday videos every single day for a year!

saulpw 2y ago
If they get 5000 sitcom stars doing 10 videos/day for 200 days/year and Cameo gets $10 each, that's 5000*200*10*10 = $100m. Those numbers seem at least napkin reasonable to me..
- itake 2y ago
  200 * 10 = 2,000 videos per year per celeb. Is there really 2k customers each year every year trying to book a support character from a 1990s tv show?
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    I see the demand but not the supply. Most famous/rich celebrities would a 9-to-5 type of job, lol. For them to be worth it, it would have to be like 1-10k per video, which the average person wouldn't pay at all. Exhibit A, they're broke. But I do appreciate their short life, I got a real fun video from Flavor Flav out of it :D.
  - realityfactchex 2y ago
    Maybe not today, but get distribution of that back catalog right and everybody's happy? To great extent, people watch what is promoted to them as a trend, no?
- bruce511 2y ago
  5000 sitcom stars? I'm not in the US but are there really that many? What's the qualification here? Some guy who had a random walk-on in season 5 episode 3? And you're thinking that 2000 people a year know about this random dudette? And will pay $50 for a cameo? If you think this is reasonable then do I have an opportunity for you. (And even if it was remotely possible thats income, not dividends.. )

bastawhiz 2y ago

I don't think this should be surprising. The celebrities that people would want are rich enough that they don't need to say happy birthday to your friends. The celebrities using Cameo are the ones who are broke, or don't want to do a toothpaste commercial, or who can't get work because they're politically extreme, or simply not popular enough to keep a steady stream of (insert whatever they usually do) going. Cameo stops being a good idea when the people doing the videos aren't exciting for the people who want the videos. We crossed that line years ago.

excalibur 2y ago
Cameo works great for people who aren't so dull that every celebrity they're interested in is a super-wealthy A-lister.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Agreed! If any of the celebrities they care to get videos from are on Cameo. Which, as it turns out, isn't really the case.
- kbos87 2y ago
  Agree, I don't think product-market fit is the problem here. A lot of the takes here assume they need to attract top talent and they don't. There's a very long tail of popular-ish, C and D list celebrities who can command $50-$250 a video. There's a business that can work, though I agree it could never command the insane valuation it had at the peak. There's also a reasonably good likelihood that their costs aren't well managed.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    There is always two sides I am starting to think here. The size of the team working and if that is growing when it does not need to and is it in some over priced location. And then there is how much is being burned on marketing. I have not seen it for Cameo, but just looking at sponsorship deals in social media and one wonders is there really that much money in this single spot?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sackfield 2y ago

Does anyone know what this fine is about? It says celebrity endorsements but I'm not actually sure what the root issue is here?

toomanyrichies 2y ago
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2024/attorney-general-james-secures-100000-cameo-over-misleading-videos https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2024/attorney-general-james-... "New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced a bipartisan, 30-state settlement with the owner of Cameo, Baron App Inc., for failing to ensure consumers knew that videos promoting products were paid endorsements... In 2020, Cameo... launched a service called Business Cameo that allows companies to pay celebrities to record videos endorsing their products. The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that Cameo failed to implement measures to ensure those videos were properly disclosed as paid endorsements, which violated endorsement rules issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and New York’s consumer protection laws."
rasz 2y ago
If I had to guess gambling/crypto endorsements framed as sincere/spontaneous messages.

TrackerFF 2y ago

This is one of those things that shouldn't have been a startup - at least not from the growth side of things. It's a nifty service that could thrive in the small/medium business side of things, but tech startup growth/scale and billion valuation - nah.

grues-dinner 2y ago
Maybe everything falls under that. It's taken as read that the goal is supposed to be explosive and/or exponential growth, global takeover and multi-billion valuations for everything from software frippery for getting a birthday video from the guy who voiced the cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch to chat apps and taxi bookings to hardware like phones, cars and ICs, industries like farming and mining and even services like banks. Is a monoculture of a few warring behemoths really the outcome that is ideal in the long run? At the human scale, it feels a bit like being a bystander (byfloater?) in a kayak during a nuclear naval battle. A bit like real ecology, an ecosystem is said to be thriving most when there's a diverse and dynamic mix, with nothing particularly dominating. Though of course the agricultural output of such an environment is lower than 10000 acres of monospecies wheat fields tended by 30-plus-ton tractors[1]. I wonder what a world would look like if it were disallowed for any company or ownership group to exceed a certain size. Economies of scale would maybe then be more acheivable though federation and cooperation rather than monopolism, lawfare and secrecy. And before libertarians start shouting or hiding under the bed, it's more a shower thought, rather then my personal NWO agenda. And I'm aware it would require more than national-level edicts. [1]: A problem in itself: https://resoilfoundation.org/en/agricultural-industry/dinosaurs-mechanical-threat-soil/ https://resoilfoundation.org/en/agricultural-industry/dinosa...
kristopolous 2y ago
That's the problem with tech startup culture. $10 million businesses get pumped and stretched to be $1 billion speculations and they collapse so now you don't have useful $10 million service any more. It's like demanding every car on the road must be modified to be a souped up sports car that goes 300 mph and you're totally willing to destroy the vehicle in the process. Many years from now people will look back at this and think "these people were insane."

gexla 2y ago

How did they not know about these requirements? I know this just by seeing the endorsement disclosures everywhere I see someone on video talking about a product. It's sort of like knowing that requirements for cookie usage is a thing just because you see the acceptance forms everywhere. Or that you could work out that stop signs are a thing because you see everyone stopping at them.

Simulacra 2y ago

This is sad to hear. I love Cameo. I've purchased half a dozen of the videos, for myself, and friends. I gleefully paid for a video of Joel Murray, talking about Bobcat Goldwaith while walking down the street in New Jersey. I imagine it probably gets old for the celebrities, but I felt really lucky to be able to pay for their time and ask them a question.

compootr 2y ago

https://archive.ph/Nwg1t https://archive.ph/Nwg1t

nanidin 2y ago

Cameo is in a great position to pivot to licensed generative AI cameos. They have the relationships with the celebrities that are willing to do it for money, and that seems like the hard part.

999900000999 2y ago

What a weird business. If you're popular enough people want to pay for a cameo, why not spin up your own service (I could probably do this in a weekend). Or literally just put your PayPal on your website and pinky promise to send a video in exchange for a hundred dollars or whatnot.

yamumsahoe 2y ago

fine line between gigs and jobs. turn gigs into jobs then it loses the fun factor.

yamumsahoe 2y ago
i mean it loses its stickiness. it becomes a fucking chore. gigs thrive on lack of structure. jobs thrive on structure, stability, consistency, reliability.

MediumD 2y ago

A lot of people saying the business model doesn't justify a $1bn valuation (rightfully so), but I'm guessing the valuation wasn't for their current business, but on the possibility that Cameo became the new way for booking talent in the age of the internet. They could have become a $1bn business if they had "revolutionized talent management" (or something like that). Not saying it was a good investment, or one I would have made, but I'm guessing they pitched a larger vision than simply a buttload of cameos from washed-up/reality TV stars.

whjkh 2y ago

[dead]

xnx 2y ago

If deepfakes haven't killed Cameo yet, the latest LivePortrait-class tools will.