It started, as many things do, with drama in the WhatsApp group. It was 2021, and a loose coalition of my friends and acquaintances was passing the on-again, off-again lockdowns by playing a spectacularly vicious online game called Subterfuge, in which treachery and betrayal are all part of how to play.
Only, this time, people had gone too far and someone had been upset badly enough that they had quit the group. To win him back, my friends came up with a dubious plan – they would have Nigel Farage, of all people, record an ironic apology video urging their departed comrade to rejoin the group.
Because of Cameo, to which Farage had recently signed up, doing this was easy: for about £100, Farage recorded and delivered a 60-second video clip through the app in less than 24 hours. The gambit worked, too: thanks to Cameo and a fairly baffled reading by Farage of a bunch of in-jokes that he had no means of understanding, peace in the friendship group was restored.
This was one of many uses of Cameo, a service that allows anyone to request a custom video from a celebrity or influencer for one of their friends, and have it delivered within 24 hours. The site was a sleeper hit during the Covid lockdowns, and managed to raise investment valuing it at $1bn in 2021.
But since then, it’s hit hard times. The videos are still being produced, it still has an… eclectic mix of celebrities and influencers (of whom more later), but it seems to be struggling to pay even relatively small bills.
Last month, Business Insider reported on a settlement Cameo had reached with 30 US states after it was found to have breached Federal Trade Commission rules on celebrity endorsements.
Cameo had been fined $600,000 – theoretically a modest amount for a billion-dollar company – but had demonstrated in court filings it was unable to pay that amount, instead settling for just $100,000 (split between 30 different states). So what went wrong?
Day to day, the site still seems to operate much as it always has, offering anyone in the market for a custom video a range of actors, comedians and influencers to make their videos. UK names include the actor Miriam Margolyes (£134 for a video), the ex-footballer John Terry (£197), the singer Gareth Gates (£47) or the presenter and environmentalist Ben Fogle (£71).
US names include ‘NSync’s Lance Bass (£235), Dean Norris, who played the DEA agent Hank Schrader in Breaking Bad (£193), and former stalwarts of the US version of The Office Kevin Malone, AKA Brian Baumgartner (£154), or “Meredith the drunk”, Kate Flannery (£150).
While each has their own fanbase, and in some cases cult following, Cameo has struggled to attract or retain A-list celebrities or influencers with top-tier followings. Part of the reason for this has been that using the app comes with significant reputational risks for big names – people have scripted videos trying to trick famous faces into saying racial slurs or other insults, and have even used them for more sinister purposes.
Last year, a “Russian-aligned group” commissioned and then spliced together a series of videos recorded from Cameo and similar services to make it look as if a variety of US celebrities were calling the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a corrupt drug addict, while they believed they were helping to stage an intervention.
The misinformation effort included Cameo appearances from the actor Elijah Wood and the boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson, both of whom have since suspended their Cameo presence, as well as Norris and Flannery, who remain active on the site.
Cameo takes a 30% slice of the creator’s fee for handling the sale, transaction fees, and hosting and sending the videos. The biggest creators seem to have decided to pass up this potential revenue stream – either because it requires making lots of individual videos that won’t go public, or because of the risks – but smaller creators say it is a useful and low-effort source of funds, with little downside.
“I toggle it off quite a lot of the time, which closes the booking window when I’m busy, and you can pick and choose the ones you want to do,” says one standup comedian who preferred to remain anonymous. “I don’t have any negative experiences from using the app.”
Another potential turnoff for bigger names is that Cameo has become associated with fringe or failed politicians. Nigel Farage has been on Cameo since 2021, and is one of the most divisive political figures in Britain (who failed to get elected to parliament on his first seven attempts).
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Stateside, the disgraced former Republican Congressman George Santos ($99+) reportedly now makes more money from Cameo £78than he made as an elected representative, while Mike Flynn – an election-denying, far-right Christian nationalist and former Defense Intelligence Agency chief who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser – was a Cameo regular too.
There is also the problem that Cameo tends to attract novelty buyers rather than repeat customers or subscribers. The Subterfuge WhatsApp group, for example, has not upset someone enough in the three years since the Farage incident to require a further Cameo video.
These are just some of the problems hampering Cameo’s valuation, explains the tech analyst Joseph Teasdale, of Enders Analysis.
“Cameo was a pandemic phenomenon. Celebrities could record selfie videos even when they couldn’t play stadium shows or star in movies. On the demand side, a video from Cameo made a great experiential gift when other options were limited. Now celebrities and consumers all have better things to be doing than recording and watching personalised videos,” he says.
“When your selling point is that your suppliers are famous and desirable, you run into a problem: they’re the ones with the name recognition, they’re the ones who are attracting users, so they are able to capture most of the value being generated. These aren’t anonymous TikTok creators who can be replaced if they leave when they don’t like the terms; Cameo lives or dies by the big names it attracts on to the platform.”
Those big names seem to be sticking to the big platforms – TikTok, YouTube, Instagram – where the mass audiences lie, and where repeating revenue can be secured from advertising and monthly subscriptions, rather than one-off novelty videos for individual subscribers.
That leaves Cameo necessarily limited to smaller creators, influencers and B- or C-list celebrities who might welcome the extra cash, and be willing to lean into novelty or ironic video production to get it. For those with a bit of time on their hands, who aren’t worried that their videos might be used to damage their brand, it’s a welcome service – though not one that will ever make Cameo’s founders or investors as rich as they’d hope.
Still, one of the site’s stars remains loyal and active. Despite being elected as the MP for Clacton, and against a backdrop of violent far-right riots across the UK, Nigel Farage was apparently finding time to keep up with his Cameo requests: at the time of writing, the site showed his last completed video was made at 10.30pm on Tuesday.
