What Snoop Dogg Knew About Cameo Before Anyone Else Did

“Steven, this is brilliant,” Snoop told him. “My second biggest fan base is in Brazil. This is a way for me to go to Brazil without having to go to Brazil. Let me on this so we can billionize this together.”

That’s how Cameo got one of its biggest early users. Not through an agency pitch. Not through a marketing campaign. Through a music legend who immediately understood the math.

The math is this: the internet creates more fame every day, but the business models that support fame are growing linearly at best. Cord-cutting, streaming economics, and platform algorithm changes mean there’s less money per famous person, even as the total number of famous people explodes.

“86 percent of the members of the Screen Actors Guild don’t make enough money to qualify for their healthcare and pension benefits,” Galanis told me. “At any given time, 99.9 percent of SAG is unemployed.”

In sports, the top 1 percent of athletes make 99 percent of endorsement revenue. On YouTube, the top 3 percent of creators make 97 percent of ad revenue.

Galanis saw that direct-to-fan monetization would have to be the answer. And so Cameo became the platform where anyone could pay a talent for a personalized video message.