My birthday was last month (still accepting belated greetings in the comments below). I was sick and sheltering in place, and my sister kindly gifted me a Cameo of Kids in the Hall/Newsradio star Dave Foley. His hair was blue for some reason and I found out he has a dog named Falkor. It was the best. Seriously. A+ birthday present.
With America’s celebrities trapped at home like the rest of us, this moment is shaping up to be a golden age for Cameo. The company tells TechCrunch that bookings have gone up 7x since stay at home orders went into effect back in March. And the site is capitalizing accordingly. Yesterday, the startup added Zoom calls to the list of booking options.
As ever, the bar for what constitutes a celebrity is pretty much what one would expect from this sort of feature, with a selection of a few dozen folks that leans fairly heavily on the world of reality stars. Even so, there are some familiar faces here: Brett Favre, Andrew Dice Clay, D. Drew, Sinbad and Tony Hawk among others, all prepared to answer your extremely awkward questions during family gatherings or office happy hours.
Bookings are scheduled for 10 minutes, with prices ranging from $1,500 for Jeremy Piven (we all have a lot of unanswered Entourage questions) to $150 for Nikki Blonsky, who starred in the 2007 film adaptation of the musical adaptation of the film Hairspray. Zoom says a number of the bookings have stuck around a bit longer than the official 10 minutes in the early beta trials for the feature. So maybe you’ll get a little more Gilbert Gottfried for your (750) buck.