George Santos is living his best life. The disgraced congress member from New York—who recently made history by becoming the first House member to be ejected by his colleagues without a criminal conviction—says he has found a new and better source of revenue: making personalized videos on Cameo for $500 apiece. “I will have made more money in seven days than I would’ve made in an entire year in Congress,” Santos told CBS New York recently.
Santos’s boasts have brought renewed attention to Cameo, the website and app where users can commission personalized videos from celebrities. Its roster of past and current stars includes professional athletes like football Hall of Famer Brett Favre, actors like Chuck Norris and Ice-T, reality TV stars from The Real Housewives and Survivor, social media influencers, comedians, and even Santa Claus. The site, which exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, had struggled to stay in the zeitgeist in recent years—but Santos may have given it the lifeline that it needed.
“George is up there with the best launches that we’ve ever had,” Steven Galanis, cofounder and CEO of Cameo, told Fortune. “His first day on Cameo was right up there with Bon Jovi or Sarah Jessica Parker.”
Santos, 35, was expelled from Capitol Hill on Dec. 1 after a federal indictment and an unfavorable report from the House Committee on Ethics that found “substantial evidence” he had knowingly and repeatedly broken the law. Never one to shy away from a hustle, Santos had a Cameo account by Dec. 4.
Since joining the platform, Santos has raised his rates from $75 to $500 per video, which usually clock in from 30 seconds to a minute long, and has told Semafor that his Cameo income already dwarfs his $174,000 congressional salary.
The former politician is perhaps even better known now than during his time on Capitol Hill. His Cameos have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram and have led to further publicity opportunities, like his recent hot-seat-style interview with comedian and writer Ziwe Fumudoh. Santos helped bring Cameo back into the limelight, and Cameo elevated Santos into a Gen Z icon.
From NFL has-beens to bona fide actors
Cameo was founded in 2017 by Galanis, Martin Blencowe, and Devon Spinnler Townsend. The idea came to Galanis after Blencowe (an NFL agent at the time) got the Seattle Seahawks’ Cassius Marsh to appear in a video congratulating one of Blencowe’s friends, who was a Seahawks fan, on becoming a father.
Witnessing the heartwarming moment made Galanis realize something was missing: money.
“I saw that video and was like, ‘We should sell this,’” Galanis told Fortune.
The founders, all former college athletes, knew that roughly every two out of three professional athletes go broke after retirement, so Cameo was originally conceived as a way to help retired athletes “get paid to become more famous and more beloved,” Galanis said. It soon expanded beyond the athletic set, and as of this summer, anyone can become Cameo “talent” and start sending greetings for a fee. Before that, there were three primary avenues to joining the platform: submitting an application, a referral from existing Cameo talent, or an invitation from Cameo staff.
Cameo operates on a revenue-sharing business model, taking a 25% to 30% cut of talent earnings, and the talent pick their own rates—an intentional decision so as to avoid inadvertently offending celebrities, according to Galanis. The average cost per video is $71—but prices run the gamut.
Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary’s greetings sell for $1,500. Succession’s Brian Cox, who plays Logan Roy, charges $689. A video from Kate Flannery, best known as Meredith from The Office, goes for $190. Ernie Sabella, the voice of Pumbaa in The Lion King, will sing “Hakuna Matata” or wish people a happy birthday for $27. The most expensive talent on Cameo was Floyd Mayweather, who charged $10,000, but the boxing champion has since paused his account.
Cameo exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered many businesses and made meaningful human interactions obsolete. In 2020, it landed on venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s “Marketplace 100” list, which features the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups. In March 2021, Cameo raised a $100 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation, marking its entrance into the “unicorn” startup club. The following month, Galanis revealed his plans to take the company public in the next few years, CNBC reported. (However, going public isn’t in the near-term cards now, Galanis told Fortune.)
Then the pandemic came to a close, and Cameo faced a reckoning: “As the second vaccine came out and people started spending money on concerts and trips and games, we saw our core business drop precipitously,” Galanis said.
After two rounds of layoffs last year and this year, Cameo’s staff shrank from “nearly 400” employees to 32 today. Now, the CEO says, the company is on good footing. Cameo’s reduced team manages a larger-than-ever talent base; bookings are up 42% for December year over year; and the business’s revenue for 2023 today is 400% greater than for 2019.
Not to mention the wave of publicity that Santos is bringing to the platform, Galanis said: “Every Cameo is a commercial for the next one.”
He added that Santos enrolled of his own accord. “We didn’t reach out to him,” Galanis said.
At this rate, Galanis says Santos is on track to reaching six-figure, “Carole-Baskin-during-COVID numbers” by the end of the month, Galanis added. While Cameo did not reveal specific figures, Baskin, the villain of the 2020 Netflix docu-hit Tiger King, was putting out 30 Cameos a day for $299 a pop, according to the Washington Post.
‘Carole-Baskin-during-COVID numbers’
The former congressman is another example of self-enrolled Cameo talent gone viral, ranking No. 1 on Cameo’s “Today’s top 10” list alongside actor-musician James Buckley and Santa. Even Sen. John Fetterman and late night host Jimmy Kimmel have forked over money for his coveted Cameos.
Kimmel revealed that he sent Santos outrageous backstories to determine whether there’s a line the congressman wouldn’t cross for a segment titled “Will Santos Say It?” (So far, Kimmel hasn’t found the line.) But after discovering Kimmel was airing his Cameos, Santos demanded $20,000 for the broadcasting rights.
“Can you imagine if I get sued by George Santos for fraud?” Kimmel joked. “I mean, how good would that be? It would be like a dream come true.”
Fraud is one of the crimes Santos stands accused of—the former politician faces a federal indictment on 23 counts of money laundering, wire fraud, identity theft, and other crimes.
But aside from the Kimmel spat, Santos has remained largely unfazed by the trolls. “Screw the haters. The haters are gonna hate,” Santos said in a Cameo gifted to Nebraska state Sen. Megan Hunt. “Look, they can boot me out of Congress, but they can’t take away my good humor or my larger-than-life personality, nor my good faith and the absolute pride I have for everything I’ve done.”
