EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.

So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

How Cameo turned D-List celebs into a monetization machine

You might not have heard of Cameo, but it really is fascinating – it allows celebrities to send messages to their fans (for a price). And it has been a particular hit with celebrities at the bottom of the celeb ladder.

(Marker, approx 19 mins reading time)

The product itself is as simple as it is improbable. For a price the celeb sets —anywhere from $5 to $2,500 — famous people record video shout-outs, aka “Cameos,” that run for a couple of minutes, and then are delivered via text or email. Most Cameo videos are booked as private birthday or anniversary gifts, but a few have gone viral on social media. Even if you don’t know Cameo by name, there’s a good chance you caught Bam Margera of MTV’s Jackass delivering an “I quit” message on behalf of a disgruntled employee, or Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath dumping some poor dude on behalf of the guy’s girlfriend. (Don’t feel too bad for the dumpee, the whole thing was a joke.)

Read all of the Evening Longreads here>