The Crazy Rise & Fall Of Cameo

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0:59So no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone all protected with end-to-end encryption It's time for whatsapp message privately with everyone learn more at whatsapp.com Hello and welcome to this episode of the rest is entertainment with me marina hyde and me richard osman Marina where where are you at the moment? I'm in Ibiza, which means we're parted and it makes me very sad. Tell me about your trip. Where are you? I am in Edinburgh for the festival, being hosted by our lovely friends at Monkey Barrel Comedy and their podcast studio. So I've got lots of flyers behind me. Well, I remember when we used to pass out flyers when I was doing shows in Edinburgh.

1:42We had to try and come up with something that makes people take your flyer and we used to always just say, take a flyer, pass a buyer. Oh, that's good. They would always involuntarily laugh and think, oh, fine, I'll have one more of these things. I've been at the Edinburgh Fringe for the last 35 years and I've not taken a single flyer in all that time. Take a flyer, parser buyer. Okay, I will. Actually, I will. What are we talking about this week? Right, we're going to talk about Cameo, the celebrity messaging app which has hit the skids. It might be the most 21st century story of all time, the story of Cameo.

2:17what else are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about Tubi and fast, free, supported television channels, which are just the biggest runaway success. Another 21st century story, perhaps. Yeah, exactly. And existential threat to Netflix. And we're also talking about the entertainment industry and China and video games and films and what happens in China, what happens outside of China, all that kind of stuff. Shall we begin then on Cameo? Yes, shall we? Now, this was started in 2016 by three guys. And if you haven't sampled Cameo, celebrities have to sign up or sub-leberties, I would say.

2:54I think as long as you've got 20 ,000 followers. How dare you? I've been on it for seven years. You can get a personalized video message from a celebrity. It's one of those businesses that really took off in the pandemic and was randomly valued as a billion dollars, making it a unicorn as they call it a tech startup that suddenly becomes a billion dollar company and this is the biggest why you'll have to explain to me why this it has now hit the skids really quite badly they were recently fined for a sort of endorsement advertising thing in the US and they were given a$600 ,000 fine they were unable to pay the$600 ,000 which if you're a billion dollar company you probably should be able to find down the back of one of your fund breakout area sofas.

3:43One of your non-fungible sofas. One of your non-fungible sofas. They could only pay $100 ,000 and that had to be split between 30 states. So they had 400 staff in 2020. I think they've now got 33. What's gone wrong, Richard? It is an amazing story. I think, as you say, a lot of us sort of became familiar with it, maybe round about lockdown, when we realised we could get John Virgo to record a birthday message for our uncle, which is a great service, I would say. Yeah, set up by three guys, the two main guys, Stephen Galanis and Martin Blenko. Martin Blenko was an NFL agent and Stephen Galanis worked for LinkedIn.

4:21Martin Blenko got one of his clients, Cassius March, to just record a video. He was an NFL player. I don't know. Are they quarterbacks and things in that game? They are. They are. He recorded a message for a friend who just had a baby and Stephen Galanis saw just how unbelievably thrilled his friend was at getting this and the two of them put their heads together and set up Cameo and it's one of those things they essentially found as many sports people as they could as many reality stars as many actors signed them up put them on this website you pay 30 pound 40 pound 50 pound depending on whoever it is you can get anyone to send a personalized message to your mum to your friends to your whatsapp group you know a million different ways to do it.

5:00They will say anything you like within reason. And it sort of took off because everyone wants a personalized birthday greeting from, you know, Kevin from the office and Kevin from the office wants to make$40 a pop to record it. I think they sort of want it for five minutes and they definitely want it in the pandemic when there isn't so much human connection. It feels to me like such a pandemic success story that then you're like, hang on, And what was all that about? Well, the reason it worked in the pandemic is this. It's not that everyone was bored and thought, I need to get messages from people.

5:33It's that everyone in the entertainment business was not working. Yeah. And everyone's source of income had gone. So lots of celebrities signed up because the key problem that Cameo has always had, as you said before, sub-lebrities and D-listers and things like this, was always the image of the thing. And they needed other people to sign up. They needed bigger celebrities. They needed the likes of Floyd Mayweather, who eventually signed up to do it. And during the pandemic, people did because there were no other sources of income. Also during the screen actor strike last year, that was the only time its popularity sort of came back.

6:05Because, again, as you say, people's income streams had dried up. Exactly that. So what you had was this company, Cameo, which had a very, very visual product, which whoever you are, wherever you work, whatever investor you are, you could be sent a message from Caitlyn Jenner. and you go wow this company is amazing who is this company so people started looking into cameo and thinking this feels like a big deal this feels like a company that could grow uh and we often talk about the the era of low interest rates and the uh the awful abominations that came out of that and cameo is one of them because they suddenly found it incredibly easy to raise money because you know this this is the secret of the last decade or so is idiots became because you could just borrow as much money as you want it is money was absolutely free and people who knew that were able to take advantage of it so cameo had us had several funding rounds and as you say by 2021 were valued at a billion dollars now steven galanis who runs this um let's say he's not short of ambition and that's good that's to be applauded i would say but let's also remember that a lot of this company is based off just people asking john virgo to wish their uncle happy birthday okay that's the that's the gold in this celebrity as a as a sort of meat puppet aren't you you're basically making them you're giving them the message you don't sort of say well by all means you know say your own thing and as a result that has been quite a liability for celebrities by the way i have to mention him because we've just seen how much he makes for cameo a year nigel farage constantly records cameos i can't remember what you last time i looked he was listed at 70 pounds I don't know what he's listed at currently but um for a message and he says he works for it on it for 24 hours a month even through the election he just sat there recording them but he has done things people have tricked him into saying pro-ira statements he people just make him say sort of ridiculous things but he honestly as you know he literally doesn't care what I said something slightly off color oh dear um so he doesn't mind to be fair he's going, do you know what?

8:13I've been paid a lot more to say a lot less. Yeah. Yes. But the trouble is that bigger celebrities, I did actually see for a while, Brian Cox was listed and he was$689, I think, for a message. Brian Cox from Succession, sorry. So I'm sure he could tell you to F off or whatever in the style of Logan Roy. But even he clearly thought, this isn't a bad way to make extra money, has removed himself from it. Because I think a lot of people's representation said to them, don't do this you don't know what you're saying half these people just aren't you know they'll just read out anything i'm sorry to say see here's the problem is it's a really beautiful business actually that works for everybody the guys who set it up they spotted a gap in the market that gap in the market was definitely there people wanted what they did celebrities wanted to do it so someone like brian baungartner who is kevin in the office um he was making a million dollars a year from doing cameos right because he would charge 70 dollars a pop and he would do so many of them james buckley jay from the in-betweeners he would do 37 cameos a day a day and he made a million dollars from cameo as well and that to me is a lovely business because who's being harmed galanis actually said look this really really really works for celebs who are more famous than they are rich and there are plenty of those it's no uh it's no surprise that you know brian Bail Gartner and James Buckley are both in ensemble comedies.

9:35So they're not making as much as Jerry Seinfeld from their comedy, but they are unbelievably famous. So that's the absolute sweet spot. So you've actually got a really nice business there. But what happens is what always happens in these stories. You start to grow, people start investing in you, and then they need you to grow more and more and more and more. So there's two things happen. Firstly, they give you a load of money. And Martin Galanis is very good at spending money. So again, This website, which I'm going to keep harking back, is John Virgo saying happy birthday to your uncle. They suddenly had a big festival called Cameo Palooza in 2021.

10:12I can just imagine their offices. Can you imagine? Paula Abdul played, Vanilla Ice played. Stephen Galanis said his plan is to build one of the most important beloved consumer companies of the generation, as enduring as what Walt Disney did for the last century. Wow, he's not held back by self-doubt, is he? I don't think he is. Here's a guy who does not have imposter syndrome, I would say. They rented their own cameo house in Hollywood, which is$60 ,000 a month. They were getting through$5 million a month. They were spending huge amounts of money. Golanus, of course, got into, what do you think he got into?

10:53Crypto art. Yeah, of course, it's exactly what he did. uh he spent hundreds of thousands on you know uh little monkey pieces of art that hackers then stole from him so essentially john virgo wishing your uncle happy birthday galanis thinks no i actually i am i'm walt disney and you think you're not you've got a really nice business here that could keep you and your friends you could honestly this would just see you through for the next 30 years with lovely money but everyone wants to be elon musk everyone wants to be mark zuckerberg you know everyone wants to be a billionaire and that's what happened to this company so their current predicament came about really because cameo is still there you can still go on there and get wolf and gladiators to toast your new baby but given they needed to have growth growth growth growth they started doing things like they launched an ad arm where celebrities would endorse your products and you can sort of see the point of that because advertisers would pay an awful lot more than i would pay for my uncle but they didn't really label these things as adverts quite as much as they should have done.

11:55So they got into all sorts of regulatory trouble. Well, that's where their$600 ,000 fine came from. Exactly that. And, you know, the fact that interest rates then went up. I mean, the story of every single media conglomerate. Yeah. I quite like their idea of rolling it out to kids. I thought that, like, getting a birthday message, that was a really good sort of, you know, I mean, the two messages from Gladiators that you have got, my daughter, Richard, have been watched about a billion times. so something like that means a huge amount to children I thought that was a sort of good idea but in general it is a small and weird and gimmicky business now one thing I think is quite an interesting one to contrast it with it's a similar thing it does provide a connection if we can call it we euphemize it as that something like only fans which also was a huge pandemic kind of success story and that's mainly adult content creators although they do now have musicians and fitness people and comedians and what have you.

12:53Again, you can subscribe and you pay to have social media style distribution of often adult content, but sometimes there's plenty of others as well. That is a hugely successful business and that has gone the opposite way. They have 220 million registered users. They got to 100 million faster than Facebook did. They have 3 million content creators. That is the trouble, you see. there weren't that many celebrities on cameo it was too risky for the big ones um as you say there was a sweet spot but in terms of that scalable thing which we always have to talk about if you want to go really big you need to have so many different creators as they're as they're called and that's what something like only fans has done and has been incredibly successful because the creators have have a lot more control over their own output there on cameo you've got zero control other than saying, I don't want to do that video.

13:45But OnlyFans, you can actually, you can curate it. Yes, OnlyFans, you can create. And they've gone in completely opposite directions. And you can see in lots of ways that they had similarities to them. But one has become a mega business and one is going to fold. Yeah, it's like a beautiful folly. And, you know, it is, I can't wait for the definitive book that someone writes about Cameo and the excess behind it. It sort of summed up by when they were really absolutely awash with money and everyone thought this was the greatest idea anyone had ever had. They had a promotional idea, which is called One Giant Leap for Fankind, which was one lucky cameo viewer and one cameo celebrity were going to be sent into space.

14:30That was going to be their competition prize. And this is, you just think, yeah, I absolutely get it. You can get someone from Heidi High to, you know, wish a happy retirement for your boss. But to turn that via the medium of low interest rates into we are sending two people into space is the most 21st century story possible, I would say. I've got a huge amount of time for it. It's such fun. The Russians went on Cameo, got a series of people. They got Mike Tyson, Sean Astin. they got Dean Norris from Breaking Bad. They got them to send a message of support to a friend of theirs who was suffering from substance abuse issues.

15:12They then edited it together as if these celebrities were sending a message to Vladimir Zelensky to encourage the rumour that he had substance abuse problems. So they created a fake video. So all of this stuff was going on. Date actors making fools of actual actors is a sad state of affairs, isn't it? I know, but hey, that's show business, right? Yeah. I don't want people to worry too much about the people who set this up. Because during the boom, the one thing, if you want to grow a unicorn, and if you want to become a startup that just has real staying power, is you don't sell your shares. You never sell them.

15:47These guys all did. They tucked a few shares away. They sold them. So they already made some money back in the early 2020s. So now, when they're sort of short on cash, they have all cashed in already. So they have feathered their nests, which is not what you're supposed to do, but it's what they've done. So I don't want people to feel sorry for the people behind Cameo. You know, it is a shame because it's a really nice idea. It brings joy to an awful lot of people. It's really simple. It connects people who have something to sell with people who want something to buy. You know, it's a lovely little business, like a bike shop on the high street.

16:25It's a little business. Yeah. Can I tell you the most lockdown story imaginable? Carol Baskin from Tiger King. This was the huge Netflix documentary that was just like an absolute monster pandemic hit. Yeah, that everyone watched during lockdown. So they signed her up during lockdown. She made$130 ,000 in her first week. I mean, there you go. That's a bubble. Get it while you can, Carol. Some of the names that we've used in that segment might not be on Cameo. We're just using them as illustrative examples. That sounds like a legal thing you've just been asked to say by a producer. Is that right?

16:59I'm afraid it is. yes yes wow i wonder what it is who have we mentioned he's heard something hasn't he neil he's heard something he's gone do you know what virgo will come for us see virgo was definitely on it he may he may not still be there i don't know brian cox was definitely on it but is no longer on it shall we have some adverts let's please

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19:17Welcome back, everybody. Now, we are now going to talk about fast tv which is free ad supported television tubi i'm i i want to say tubi tubi tubi it's very american but i want in the way that i want to say jz i want to say to tubi or not to be which is which is the pronunciation yeah now this is a service that recently launched in the uk they've been going in america for some time these free ad supported channels they have bigger market share than things like hbo paramount plus and peacock all together that's nbc i mean tubie's as big as disney plus which people a lot of people don't realize yeah so over here the story the last few years has been we have these big premium streaming services the netflix's and as you say all of that and the amazon primes and you know that's the way that tv is going and it's killing linear television and people just you know want to pay their x pound a month and have these incredible streaming services with really high-end content and what's happened in america i suspect will happen over here is these channels have sprung up all over the place tubi roku there's absolutely loads than pluto tv which is owned by paramount and they are completely free they are ad supported where do they get that idea from and there are thousands and thousands of these channels so they say these fast channels you could there's a whole channel which is just homes under the hammer.

20:44There's a whole channel which is just pointless. I discovered my absolute horror the other day. So if you want a cameo from me, just go on that and you can probably cut out each individual word to build whatever you need. People are loving this and people are mainly loving it because it's free. And actually, that idea that all we want is premium TV and new shows, that's for quite a small amount of people. Yeah, it's for people who write in newspapers. I'm sorry to say that content is not a meritocracy, that content is completely subservient to distribution. People don't care whether they're watching your 6.9 rating murder mystery or somebody else's 5.7.

21:22So little consumption of content is must have. Things like Game of Thrones, they were must have. But how much of that is there honestly out there? And what people actually want is called saliency bias. They want the thing that is in front of them and they click on it. 80 % of Netflix journeys are via the Netflix button. You start and you go and look around what's on. All this kind of destination stuff, it's nonsense. I'm sorry to say that distribution is far more important than content. And that's the fascinating thing with Tubi and all of these, is yet it plays into that thing that, yes, everyone talks about the amount of hours in their catalogue, and I think Tubi in America has got 200 ,000 hours.

22:05And most of Netflix is a very similar 200 ,000 hours, apart from, as you say, the big sort of marquee things. So the business model of all of these things is, if you don't really, really need to see these big new things, all you want is the rest of the 200 ,000 hours, then just come here. You're not paying. The ad load, the amount of adverts you see in an hour, is actually lower than it would be on terrestrial TV. It's about eight minutes an hour instead of 12 minutes an hour. So it's a fairly seamless experience. As you say, that thing, the passivity, which we took absolutely for granted as kids and people of our generation of you turn on the tv and you watch what is on and if it's not the thing you want you switch over to bbc2 or itv or channel 4 and then you watch what's on there the received wisdom is that that's the thing that's disappeared completely because we have absolute total choice and so we can you know we can browse and browse and browse until we find the thing we want but human beings don't really like too much choice You know, we have absolute choice paralysis.

23:07There's so much on. And so this idea that you can literally just go down the fast channels and go, oh, there's homes under the hammer. There's a place in the sun. There's come dine with me. And you just watch that. You watch the episode that they've put on at that moment for you. You watch a few adverts. You watch the next episode that's on. Like, I always think if I watch Frasier in the morning on channel four, I could find any of those episodes at any point and watch Frasier. I could download it. I could watch it whenever I want. but I've never done that in my life. But lots of mornings, I will literally turn the TV on and there's Niles and there's Frasier and I'll sit and watch it.

23:41And the thing that people said was that, you know, young people, oh, you know, they want destination view. They go there and they don't want any ads because they're not used to them. They've grown up with YouTube, okay? They'll watch a ton of ads. They like things to be free and they don't mind ads. And they also don't just want short form video, which is another thing people say. They really like long things. They like lots of long form things and they want to sit in front of it. Again, we come back to this saliency bias thing. As people always say, if you want to hide something and have nobody find it, put it on the second page of the Google searches.

24:11And this is why people spend such a lot of money in the EPG, the Electronic Programming Guide, to be up there near the top because people get very bored scrolling down. What it shows to us, again, is that content providers are just totally subservient to the platform owners and to the platforms. And once you've got people on your platform, you don't really have to serve them a gourmet meal. This has been the evolution of digital TV is that people thinking, oh, yeah, no, no one will watch any ads, none of this sort of stuff. People are wrong again. And as we've discussed, all of these streaming services are bringing out these free tiers because people want free things.

24:50And they feel that they have to have a free tier because otherwise they're going to lose out to these ones that are only free. And also, by the way, when we talk about shows being non-premium, if I sit and watch Border Patrol Australia, that's a brilliantly made television show. These shows are brilliantly made. It's not trash. It's not swill. These are made by programme makers who love it and who have a format and it's compelling to people. So it's not like, oh, we'll put out any old rubbish. There is such an enormous back catalogue over the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years of great television shows, which you very, very happily sit down, have on in the background while you're on your phone doing something else as well.

25:30And that is an enormous market. That's an easier way for them to get into streaming and to go straight to Netflix. If my mum goes on Netflix, she doesn't know when things are on. So, you know, whereas with this, you're like, okay, I can turn on, I can turn on this and I can watch, you know, Judge Judy all day long. It's one of those lovely kind of sweet spot markets that we lost between us telling ourselves endlessly that linear tv was over and between saying that you know these game of thrones type shows are the future of television right in the middle as always in culture is pretty much everyone and pretty much everyone is the target market for tubie and roku and freebie and all of these things which are which are going to get bigger and bigger i think tubie's owned by fox and as we said they launched last month I think in the UK how do you think it's going to fare in a in the UK market which as we know has lots of great free-to-air television and free-to-air linear television and the channels are easy to find they have great access to prominence it's a different proposition what they've said is we're going to try and serve sort of more niche audiences we're going to try and fandoms and communities and things like that and we've seen that like supposedly underestimated audiences non-median viewers things like romanticy that genre which we've talked about something that has just been missed by an industry do i think they're going to have to sort of they're going to do some originals but they're going to have to they are going to have to go a little bit more niche because the mainstream free is very well catered for well i think that's the fascinating thing over here is it's it's it's about to show us something very interesting it's about to highlight something very interesting that already exists now in this industry netflix are fine youtube are fine they're both around 10 of viewing and they know their business they do it incredibly well the trouble is for the smaller streamers the disney pluses the amazon primes apples all of that kind of stuff but it's mad that we're talking about you know something like disney as one of the smaller streamers and a lot of people won't get that because it seems so prestige it seems so big they have these huge big shows that they spend a massive amount of money on and this as you say it's about to show us something yeah well i think what it's about to show us is we already have some of the greatest fast tv in the world so you've got all four which is channel four well that's been 4od i think it might just be called channel four now but that is their their streaming proposition we have itvx we have my five i mean iplayer doesn't even have adverts we already have this uh extraordinary bank of programs and programming and the executives at those channels worked out this was coming a very long time ago and have built this stuff up and you know channel four have been very good at really really skewing uh all four as young as they possibly can and you know spearheaded by things like married at first sight and uh and taskmaster because they sort of know that this is where most of streaming is going there's always going to be as i say youtube is always going to be fine netflix is always going to be fine up to the point where something catastrophic happens.

28:32But for the rest of that industry, actually, there's a lot of eyeballs to be won, there's a lot of money to be made. And ITV, Channel 4 and BBC all have a big advantage, which in the States doesn't really exist. So I think Tubi will find it harder. But I think, weirdly, when you present something that you've already had as something new, people love the novelty of it. So you can find Tubi on your smart TV and download it and look through it and actually people will enjoy doing that and it'll take about 18 months before you go oh but hold on there i've got another channel that's like this haven't i um itvx which has got loads and loads of big dramas that's not on that you think oh i'm gonna i'm gonna spend some time on that as well this stuff already exists in our country and already has its incredible bank of programming it's just we talk a lot about the fact that billions and billions and billions and billions have been spent to get us back to exactly where we started linear tv as we know it will be dismantled at some point but the heart of it you hope that channel 4 and itv and bbc are able to use this new world and this massive market to still stay relevant to still stay profitable and still be investing in original british programming so i i think probably is quite a hopeful story yeah marina shall we talk about china let's please china and the entertainment industry there's been a huge story this week um a computer game was released called black myth wukong it's Chinese studio called Game Science and it's pretty much the first they call it a premium triple-A game very very high production values I should say it's got a monkey king as the main character so based on this kind of Chinese cultural epic called Journey to the West from the 16th century but anyway by Wednesday it had topped the charts worldwide on Steam which is one of the platforms you can play it on it had over 2.2 million peak concurrent users which means that that's it's been the most popular game in Steam's global history.

30:29And Steam is the single number one site. If you're the most popular on Steam, you are the most popular in the world. Yeah. So this is extraordinary. It's got masses of press in the Chinese state media, as you can imagine. They've been really iffy about gaming, by the way, in China, because they felt like people are becoming addicted. I mean, we know the feeling. People are becoming addicted. They had a console ban until 2014. So 10 years ago, you couldn't even use a PlayStation. This game, you don't need a VPN for it on Steam. So that's a change. And the Chinese state media have called it a cross-cultural bridge.

31:01So there's a real change in attitude. They've allowed the creators to have interviews in state media, things like that. One of the drawbacks, Western live streamers who are a big way of getting any game out, you're warned not to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, which includes any words like quarantine or isolation, feminist propaganda, not entirely clear in what context you might discuss that but and no other content that instigates negative discourse so there's been a whole like oh no look you know the censorship of the games well it's really interesting to see that this is now a premium cultural product that has come I want to say this way it sounds like I'm anchored but this is you know we make our podcasts in the UK and this is what we're talking back this has gone westwards this um and it's become a huge hit now the west uh attempts to push culture the other way into china which have been enormous and a lot of people are completely unaware of this but it has been massive and i'm going to just talk a little bit about hollywood if i can because i think that's an interesting way into it recently another movie that came out alien romulus that has hugely overperformed in the chinese box office which is sort of amazing and the dream and has been the dream of Hollywood now for decades.

32:18And it has sometimes happened. But the reason they wanted it to perform is the US box office basically needs, or box office in America in the Hollywood film industry needs nine or 10 billion to stay as it is. Okay. And in a world where theaters are shutting every week, where people aren't going to the cinema, to have access to China, which briefly in the pandemic became the biggest movie going audience in the world was huge. And Hollywood has done everything for it. And it's done it all covertly. And it's very, very bad, I think. The Chinese censorship department. Now, they re-allowed movies in the end of the 80s, at the start of the 90s.

32:59You were allowed once more to watch foreign movies in China. They were completely banned under the Cultural Revolution. But they had a quota. So you were allowed 20 Hollywood films, 14 what they call commercial films. And they wanted those things to be very technology-based, like IMAX, 3D, things like that. They needed the product, basically, to get their film industry off the ground. And America, obviously, needed the money. So if you've lost money on US screens, say, the sheer volume of people that may potentially see a movie in China could help you recuperate. This is a place where movie theatres are still opening.