Why Kylie Jenner is a Different Kind of Celebrity

All right, so we're going to talk about the best type of fame. Here's how we're going to open it up. So what do you think the best type of fame is, Neil?

I think the best type of fame is if you're really well known in a massive TAM.

Okay, what would be an example of that?

Let's say you're really well known in the makeup industry or beauty industry. So TAM stands for total addressable market for anyone listening. The bigger the TAM means more money being spent. It's not about the amount of people, it's about the amount of dollars. And that can help you generate quite a bit of revenue.

So like Kylie?

Kylie Jenner, Kylie Cosmetics. She's well known in beauty, hair extensions, lipstick, maybe.

She's just famous in general though.

She's famous in general, but a lot of it is beauty oriented. And that's why she pushed her company to be more beauty oriented.

You know what I would say? So, so my take on this one is niche fame, right? Look, so she's a little more famous. She's famous for being famous as well. Like, that's another thing. Yeah. But I think being famous, niche famous, for example, right? Like, for example, like, you know, we're— I would say like we're not celebrities or anything. And I would say like you're pretty popular in the marketing space, right? Like when I go to conferences, people recognize you, people recognize me. That's good because when you go outside into the real world, you don't get bothered by other people, right?

Yes.

But when it's kind of cool, if you go to a conference and it's like you get swarmed, I get it just enough where it's like, you know, it's like, you know, nice dopamine hits. You get swarmed, right? Like sometimes we'll speak at a We did the HubSpot event together. We did it at Marketing School on Stage. And I counted, I actually did analysis on your line sizes versus mine, right? So mine is always 25% the size of yours. So if you have 100 people, I have 25 people, right? But point is, like, it's when you're niche famous, it's like you have a lot of power in that industry. And you get to also protect your privacy as well, right? That's another thing. Now, what Neil's talking about with Kylie is like, When you're a niche, when you're famous in a niche that has a large total addressable market, you're also going to make a lot of money too.

Yeah, but I get what you're saying because doing what Kylie has done is very hard. And I know I went over this in a previous podcast, but I just want to go over these numbers again because we looked at a lot of people who are influencers, 5,920. And the average revenue that an influencer is making is $323.19. That's per month. That's in USD. For the people who had 100,000 to 999,000 followers, they were generating on average $1,727.29 per month. The people who had over a million followers a month, or not per month, but the people who had over a million followers were generating on average $6,109.83 a month. And the big issue with this is people try to accumulate followers for something that is hard to monetize. Posting bikini pictures or swim trunks for men pictures, you know, you can be a male model or a female model. That's cool, but you're only going to make so much for people paying you to pose in a bikini outfit, right? Or swim trunks. There's just not that much capital in that.

Do you remember Noah, the videographer? My videographer Noah?

Yes.

Okay, so he has a channel called Bikini Yoga now, and his YouTube channel, I think it has like 200,000 subs on it now. It's just women in bikinis doing yoga.

Okay.

And it's just growing rapidly.

So when you said that, it just— and I'm like, man, what are you going to say?

I'm like, your audience is like 99% male, right? I'm like, what are you going to sell there? But that is a situation where it's like, that's a— maybe that's an interesting audience there.

It's hard to monetize. Like when people look at MrBeast, they're like, oh my God, he's done really well. And hats off to him. He has done really well. But if you look at how much he generates per view, it's not that great. If he had views in a specific category like enterprise software and he was generating Oh my God, he'd be unstoppable. He'd be worth over $100 billion.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right? But it's— the problem is, is the moment you're selling things like burgers or chocolate to the mass audience, the margins just aren't there. You're not going to ink out too much profit.

Okay, let's use another example in tech, right? So like Sam Altman is niche famous right now in AI, right? You could say that. And you and I, if we saw him, there'd be a lot of respect, right? But I think if he goes out into the real world, I don't think he'd be noticed as much still right now. Like, he's still like on his way up. He wouldn't be noticed versus like a Bill Gates or something.

Yeah, but Bill— yes, I think Sam Altman's on his way up, but Bill Gates was the richest person in the world for a very long time.

Or Jeff Bezos, right?

Yeah, or Elon Musk. But Sam Altman could potentially get there. Either way, I think he's already very recognizable and people know him because everyone talks about ChatGPT.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think our point of this is like, there's, there's two ways of this, right? One is like, you don't want to be too famous where like your privacy gets— like your safety gets in jeopardy. That's one thing, right? The second piece is like, you do want to be niche famous where like in a good niche where there's a lot of money in it. Because for MrBeast, for example, he has a lot of views, but the reason he has to sell chocolate is because like his audience is so wide that he has to just go for something that's wide.

That's what happens when you create videos like, here's a real-life Squid Games, or here's me walking 10 hours in really big shoes, or what's the difference from a $1 yacht to a billion-dollar, $100 million yacht.

Yeah.

It's not that monetizable.

Yeah. Well, you know what? I mean, he's kind of like, maybe we'll talk about this in a future episode, but he's actually famous for being famous now. But anyway, yeah, that's it on the fame piece, I think.

Question for you. If you had to start all over again, I saw a tweet today from Brian Dean from Backlinko. He's no longer Backlinko. He's Exploding Topics. And he created his He made his first YouTube channel that wasn't about himself. Like, it wasn't Brian Dean, it was Exploding Topics, so a corporate profile.

Yeah.

Have you checked it out?

No. What's the— go on. I'm listening.

Okay. So his first video, which I thought was really good, I left a comment on his tweet. The first video was 3 categories. Let me actually just search Twitter. Brian Dean, there you go. So the first video was, or let me go back to his tweet. I've had a personal YouTube channel for almost 10 years, but I've never launched a channel for any of my brands. Well, today that changes. We've just launched our first YouTube video for Exploding Topics. And then he links to the YouTube video. If you guys haven't seen it, it's really cool. And the topic of the video is 3 products generating $1 million per month right now. And he goes over the topics, like one of them was fitness gummies, the second one was pet air purifier.

Oh.

And the third one was Electrolyte Mix.

He's going to do well.

Yeah. And he ended up breaking down the video, the reviews that these sites had, the purchases they were getting, the star ratings, the revenue. And then he also broke down what they're doing on channels like TikTok and how many views they're getting. So I thought it was really interesting. And he even breaks down like who the products appeal to, like Electrolyte Mix helps you recover faster when you're working out, but it also helps you if you're sick or you're just healing. But I thought it was really smart. And the reason I say this, Brian sold Backlinko to SEMrush. I thought it was a good move for him and a good move for SEMrush. So I think that was a win-win situation. But the real money is not made in personal branding. And I don't care what people say. They're like, look at Tony Robbins or LeBron James or the Kardashians. You still make way more money building a Google or a Coke or a SpaceX or a Tesla.

Mm-hmm.

Stuff that isn't revolving around a personal brand. If you look at Kylie Cosmetics or even, Kim Skims now, and she's done really well. You know the stuff that's going viral on TikTok over Skims?

No.

People are showing the exact product, no name brand. Oh yeah, because they're buying from the same warehouses. It's like one-third, one-fourth the cost. It's way cheaper. There's no difference. When I mean there's no difference in product, people are saying there's not even 1% of a difference other than the label and stuff. And they're like, why would you pay?

Let me give you one that's related to this. So, Loro Piana.

Okay.

If you go to Italy, if you go to the factory, you can get no logo on it and you can get it for like a 10th of the price.

But is it a Loro Piana factory?

It's a Loro Piana factory.

Available to anyone?

They send the stuff to Loro Piana. They're the factory that makes it for Loro Piana.

And you can— anyone can do it?

Not anyone can do it. So you have to be like— but I'm just saying, it's like, there's like levels to this, you know? Like my friend does it. He's also an Indian guy. He lives in the UK.

I was like, oh, I should go to this factory. It'd be cheaper to buy a plane ticket.

You might have met him before. Yeah, I don't know. But anyway.

But the moment you said anyone can do it—

No, no, but if we go with him, we can do it.

That's so much work though. But like the Skims example, anyone can go on Amazon and they're buying the copycats.

It's worth it for you.

Sure, but I could just buy less clothes and then I don't have to worry.

Okay. All right. Anyway, so that's that.

Thank you.

So I think, I think, look, that's what we think about this. We're just going to wrap it and you're going to have to listen to the next episode. So don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us grow. And some 5 stars too. That would be great. Hey, we've taken the ad load down, guys. We've taken the ad load down. We're sorry about that. We didn't know it was that bad. So yeah, we'll talk to you later.