Cameo was once valued at $1B

The math of the business model doesn’t really pass the napkin test. How many celebrities and sublebrities do you need to be actively booking 10s to 100s of videos per day to get enough revenue to justify a $1bn valuation? Perhaps that means $100m annual revenue. If Cameo is generously getting say $50/booking, that means 2 million videos per year! That’s 500 washed up sitcom stars each doing 10 happy birthday videos every single day for a year!

This is one of those things that shouldn&#x27;t have been a startup - at least not from the growth side of things.<p>It&#x27;s a nifty service that could thrive in the small&#x2F;medium business side of things, but tech startup growth&#x2F;scale and billion valuation - nah.

I don&#x27;t think this should be surprising. The celebrities that people would want are rich enough that they don&#x27;t need to say happy birthday to your friends. The celebrities using Cameo are the ones who are broke, or don&#x27;t want to do a toothpaste commercial, or who can&#x27;t get work because they&#x27;re politically extreme, or simply not popular enough to keep a steady stream of (insert whatever they usually do) going.<p>Cameo stops being a good idea when the people doing the videos aren&#x27;t exciting for the people who want the videos. We crossed that line years ago.

A lot of people saying the business model doesn&#x27;t justify a $1bn valuation (rightfully so), but I&#x27;m guessing the valuation wasn&#x27;t for their current business, but on the possibility that Cameo became the new way for booking talent in the age of the internet.<p>They could have become a $1bn business if they had &quot;revolutionized talent management&quot; (or something like that). Not saying it was a good investment, or one I would have made, but I&#x27;m guessing they pitched a larger vision than simply a buttload of cameos from washed-up&#x2F;reality TV stars.

This sounds like they just don&#x27;t have cash on hand but do have positive net worth still?<p>Not sure <i>how</i> exactly a yet-another-marketplace-app company turns $100MM into something they can&#x27;t sell to pay a fine tho.

Valuations, investors, squandered money, perhaps that was the whole plan from the begining, or it could be incompetence. Hope we’ll see less of this with high interest rates.

How did they not know about these requirements? I know this just by seeing the endorsement disclosures everywhere I see someone on video talking about a product. It&#x27;s sort of like knowing that requirements for cookie usage is a thing just because you see the acceptance forms everywhere. Or that you could work out that stop signs are a thing because you see everyone stopping at them.

This is sad to hear. I love Cameo. I&#x27;ve purchased half a dozen of the videos, for myself, and friends. I gleefully paid for a video of Joel Murray, talking about Bobcat Goldwaith while walking down the street in New Jersey. I imagine it probably gets old for the celebrities, but I felt really lucky to be able to pay for their time and ask them a question.

Does anyone know what this fine is about? It says celebrity endorsements but I&#x27;m not actually sure what the root issue is here?

Cameo is in a great position to pivot to licensed generative AI cameos. They have the relationships with the celebrities that are willing to do it for money, and that seems like the hard part.

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If deepfakes haven&#x27;t killed Cameo yet, the latest LivePortrait-class tools will.

fine line between gigs and jobs.<p>turn gigs into jobs then it loses the fun factor.

Users included George Santos, but also Rudy Giuliani. Yuck. What a turnoff

What a weird business.<p>If you&#x27;re popular enough people want to pay for a cameo, why not spin up your own service (I could probably do this in a weekend).<p>Or literally just put your PayPal on your website and pinky promise to send a video in exchange for a hundred dollars or whatnot.