How Cameo became a lucrative celebrity side-hustle

Your friend’s birthday is coming up and you want to make her feel special. There’s an app for that: Enter Cameo. Dubbed the “celebrity shout-out app”, Cameo allows you to purchase a personalised two-minute video message from a celebrity to make someone’s day.

Know a Harry Potter fan? Send Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) some cash and he’ll reminisce about his Slytherin days. Have a Game-of-Thrones-obsessed friend? Ask Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister) to scare them. Is your Dad a diehard Monty Pythoner? Rope in John Cleese for a 70th-birthday message.

Launched in 2016 by three entrepreneurs — one of them, Devon Townsend, was a viral star on now-defunct video platform Vine — the Chicago-based operation has a roster of actors, athletes and musicians charging anywhere between £20 and £2,000 for a video.

And just as Zoom hit paydirt with everyone working from home, business on the app is booming. In April, Cameo reported bookings had risen to 75,000 a week — up from 9,000 a week in January. The array of celebrities to choose from has widened too. In early March, with filming and sporting schedules frozen, bored stars began looking for fresh ways to make money on the side. The app signed 5,000 names between March and June, including The Inbetweeners actor James Buckley. There are now 40,000 personalities signed up (compared with 7,000 in June last year).

“[Stars’ revenue streams] just vanished all of a sudden, and nobody could prepare for it,” says Abbie Sheppard, chief of staff to Cameo’s COO. Plus, she says, not only did celebrities want “to feel involved and connected with their [fan] community” they also saw the “monetary potential” of signing up.

She adds that a number of celebrities, including Elijah Wood and Snoop Dogg, were referred to the app by others already on it: “Over quarantine people were telling all their friends about it. For [a lot of stars it] was really the only proper stable income stream.”

Cameo celebrities set their own rates, though the app provides suggestions based on data from talent with similar backgrounds. Sheppard predicts some of the most popular creators on the platform could make up to £1million this year. Recent months have seen an influx of British talent. Among those now charging for a video are Miriam Margolyes (£83), Miranda Hart (£166), and cricket commentator Henry Blofeld (£58). Though the rates of some celebrities are relatively affordable, others can charge far more. A Caitlyn Jenner shout-out will cost you £2,000.

Hong Kong-based photographer Justin Lim purchased a Cameo from former WWE wrestler Ted DiBiase (£62) for a Seattle friend’s birthday as he “had to come up with a gift that I knew would get there.”

US podcast host Eric Silver says he purchased a Cameo from Whose Line Is It Anyway? star Colin Mochrie (£83) for a friend’s birthday, as “we couldn’t hang out” due to the lockdown in America. A lot of stars donate their fees to charity. At the time, Mochrie was sending proceeds to NAACP Empowerment Programs. Others, such as US singer Mandy Moore, gave theirs to coronavirus relief charities via the Cameo Cares function.

Silver was delighted by how much effort Mochrie put into his message: “You get only a few hundred characters to tell [stars] what you want them to say … Colin went above and beyond.”

Users often ask celebrities to get creative with their videos. These include asking former Brazilian footballer Roberto Carlos (£166) to read out sports questions for a Zoom quiz, or getting Ghostbusters star Ernie Hudson to put on his costume from the movie. Some Cameo videos have even inspired pieces of art. In March, filmmaker Ben Berman made a quarantine short — “The Follow Up” — using Cameos from stars including Lindsay Lohan (£249) and Jon Lovitz (£125). Stars from franchises such as Rocky, are popular, as are Gilmore Girls and lesser known Friends actors. For the boomers, there’s Cleese and Engelbert Humperdinck (£249). The platform even has a section — Childhood Favourites — for people seeking out classics, from Winnie the Pooh voice actor Jim Cummings (£145) to Didi Conn, who played Frenchie in Grease (£62).

The app has a “hate bot” which deletes hateful words, though Sheppard says issues on the site are rare, “I think we’ve had a problem three times in 1.3 million Cameos”. There is also a team with the power to decline requests manually and stars are free to decline requests they don’t feel comfortable with.

Will the app ever see heavyweight stars, the Justin Biebers or the Taylor Swifts, signing up? Sheppard says it was never really designed for the A+ list. The celebrity world, she argues, is imbalanced: “The top one per cent of the music industry earn over 65 per cent of the revenue.” This gives other stars a chance to earn some money. Just don’t hold your breath for a message from Beyoncé.