Cameo raises $50M to deliver personalized messages from celebrities, influencers

>Cameo has a roster of 15,000 celebrities that they believe could expand to 5 million.

5 million celebrities???

What does the platform offer the celebrities for the 25% cut? This is a cute gimmick, but how on earth is it worth $300MM? Any value comes from novelty; when everyone is getting a custom message from a "celebrity", how much value is left? Are they betting that this society gets more enamored with influencers and celebrity? God, I hope not.

On top of that, is there even 5 million celebs to begin with? That number seems to high to me.

On the one hand I feel the desire to drop a sighing Jesus as to how stupid this is (how many companies/ideas were thought to be just ridiculous). On the other hand I can't help but see the similarity with plain old advertising, where someone gets paid to read lines to a camera and fake feelings on how awesome/cool something is. We know ice cream doesn't provoke orgasm like facial expressions in most people, but somehow the spots still get made and sold. This could turn out to be huge.

For instance, there are night establishments that have entertainers (singers, mainly) who get requests from the audience to say something, in exchange for money. It gets pretty ridiculous like things that go like "Let those who come from neighborhood X know that we have plenty of money and we made it ages ago... Screw the new rich. Check out my {fancy_car} outside.. Die of jealousy".

These people are considered stupid by almost everyone, however we're talking about serious cash. Alcohol, women, drugs, and egos. Some individuals leave something like $200k on the table on a given night. They want to be remembered as badasses or something.

Then there's the give and take. The entertainer gets paid. Even poor people put in money for their 15 seconds.

Ads are about products, in general. Cameo seems to be about people, and people have egos. This could really turn out to be huge, despite the initial cheesiness.

Cameo is a competitor to a project I worked on that just launched called Givvli - https://givvli.com

These platforms could be particularly fruitful for musicians and YouTube stars. It's a fascinating space to watch.

agreed