Celebrity selfie videos are the new autograph

Celebrity autographs are out and personalized videos are in.

And Cameo, a website that allows fans to purchase a personalized video shoutout from their favorite celebrity, is facilitating the shift.

“When you or I were kids, we would pull out the Sharpie and try to get celebrities to sign something,” the company’s CEO Steven Galanis recently told Page Six. “Today everyone wants to take a selfie with [celebrities]. If you don’t have a picture to put on Instagram it didn’t happen. So we thought about that idea and the fact that most of the time you don’t run into [a celebrity] when you really need them, right? When it’s your mom’s birthday and her favorite ‘Real Housewife’ is out there, she doesn’t just magically appear!”

Galanis teamed up with former NFL agent Martin Blencowe to create a website to connect athletes, musicians and reality stars with their fans to create personalized, informal selfie shout-out videos for them. The price per video ranges depending on the celebrity, but Galanis told us that almost “97 percent of these videos are booked as gifts for people. So it’s not [celebrities] charging their super fans.”

Celebrities on the platform include Tori Spelling, Marla Maples, Arie Luyendyk Jr., Torrei Hart and Gregg Sulkin.

“It’s invite-only today … we’re actually not trying to build this for the Justin Biebers or Lebrons of the world or Beyoncés,” Galanis said. “We’d like to work with them, but our goal is to really help the 99 percent of talent to monetize and we just think there’s this huge gap. Our mission is not to put more money in Drake’s pocket. We’re really trying to make this so everyone’s favorite creators can come on. The guys that get most requested are someone like David Dobrik, a vlogger that you’ve probably never heard of. We get more requests for David Dobrik than we do Justin Bieber.”

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