How Cameo created the perfect feedback loop
Its viral videos pull more celebrities and users into the app.
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Bloomberg: Cameo in Talks to Raise Funds at About $1 Billion Value
What I love about Cameo is that it has created an amazing feedback loop that constantly incentivizes users and celebrities to drive new people into the app.
Let’s run through that feedback loop: A Cameo user purchases a short video from a celebrity as a gift for a friend. That friend then posts the video to social media, where it goes viral (often because the celebrity reshares it on their own social media accounts). That not only drives more users to the app (due to the watermark in every video), but it also spurs more celebrities to experiment with selling videos on the app.
The pricing and format of the videos are both perfect. The videos are charming because they’re so low effort. The customer provides a series of prompts and the celebrity just shoots the video right from their phone. This allows the celebrity to charge relatively little but still generate a lot of revenue in the aggregate.
Let’s take Lindsay Lohan as an example. Even though her best movies are probably behind her, she’s still an A-list star. There are a lot of Mean Girls fans out there who would love to receive a video from her. She charges $375 for a video, which isn’t inexpensive, but also within range of what you’d expect to spend on a birthday gift. She could easily set aside just one hour a day to produce six videos for fans. Even assuming she doesn’t work on weekends, that’s over $500,000 a year, which isn’t bad money for something that literally only takes an hour of your workday.
And because of the nature of online micro fame, you don’t have to be an A-list actor to make good money on the app. A YouTuber or Instagram influencer with a few hundred thousand subscribers could probably pull down a pretty decent side income and use Cameo to further diversify their revenue. It’s low energy and low cost, yet regularly results in pretty good content and income. As I said, it’s the perfect feedback loop.
My latest: How Blockworks is building a crypto media empire
Blockworks is the quintessential fake-it-til-you-make-it company. Its founders knew nothing about hosting events before they dove in head first. They had to Google "how to create a podcast" before launching a massively successful podcast network.
That profile of Blockworks that I linked to above?
Let me talk a little about what went into making it. I first spent about an hour on the phone interviewing the company’s founders. I then transcribed the interviews and highlighted all the important bits. Next I downloaded several podcasts from their network so I could get a feel of what they were producing. After that I visited the website, read dozens of their articles, subscribed to their newsletter, and took lots of notes about the experience.
And only after all of that did I sit down and actually spend several hours writing and editing the piece.
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GEN: Snopes Debunked the World. Then the World Changed
This is a good overview on the history of Snopes and how it went from debunking chain email urban legends to battling a firehose of dangerous misinformation that spreads likes wildfire every day across Facebook and other platforms.
Insider: The founders of nonprofit newsroom The 19th break down how they survived launching in a pandemic and how they plan to keep readers engaged post-Trump
This is a good case study to read if you're planning on running a caused-based, non profit news org. I especially like how it diversified revenue between big donors, small donors, and sponsorships.
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Bloomberg: ViacomCBS Goes ‘All-In’ on Streaming, But Without Many of Its Top Shows
Most people are extremely bearish on ViacomCBS's streaming ambitions, but I think they have the right mix of content to become a streaming powerhouse: Comedy (Comedy Central), kids programming (Nickelodeon), youth-focused reality TV (MTV), black entertainment (BET), middlebrow scripted TV (CBS), and highbrow scripted TV (Showtime). And then there’s the vast Paramount movie library.
NYT: TikTok Stars and Social Media Creators Can Now Join Hollywood’s Top Union
This could play a huge role in expanding the creator economy by establishing more uniform ways for brands to interact with and employ creators.
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.