The business side of Kim Kardashian‘s rise to fame is being outed in a brand new podcast chat!
This week, former Splash News CEO Gary Morgan went on the Hollywood Raw podcast and divulged ALL the details about how the SKIMS mogul turned herself into an A-list star with a pointed paparazzi effort back in the day. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at this… but hearing about Kim’s savage business tactics sure is fascinating!!
Related: Kim Shares Relatable Parenting Moment — Her Kids Could NOT Handle This!
Morgan chatted with podcast hosts Dax Holt and Adam Glyn for an hour in a new episode of their show released a few days ago. During that time, he revealed Splash News’ working relationship with Kim and the rest of her famous family as they were on their rise to becoming household names.
Back in the day (AKA the 2000s), Morgan recounted how Kim was “really helpful” and would work hard to “orchestrate” shoots, “airbrush” all her photos, and lay out exactly how she wanted to appear. She also demanded prompt payment for all her paparazzi pics from the agency itself. After all, if they were going to profit, she wanted the money, as well!
Morgan explained:
“She was amazing and especially in the early days, she was really helpful. You’d do the shoot, she’d orchestrate it, you had to shoot a certain way, you know, she hadn’t quite worked out where her butt was going at the time. And so she’d have to edit all the pictures, she’d have to airbrush do what she wants to do, send them back, and then we’d sell them and literally the next day she’d go, ‘Gary, how did we do?’ And she’d look at her phone going, ‘oh no, please, no.’ And I’d go, ‘OK, well we did really well. We made this here, this here, this here, this here.’ And she goes, ‘great, so send me a check for $20,000.’ I go, ‘well, what do you mean?’ [Kim said], ‘well, you’ve sold them so I want the money.’ [I go], ‘yeah, but they’re not even printed yet. We’ve sold them, but they haven’t been printed and then they have to pay us. That takes a month, then we have to go through our system. So in about three months you get your money.’ [She goes] ‘no, I want it now.'”
Then, the ex-pap agency exec added, Kim would flip that money into even more money by pitching the photos to fashion houses and jewelers and getting them to pay her to wear pieces in subsequent paparazzi pics:
“From a licensing point of view, it’s not a great deal of money because obviously she’s splitting it with me and the photographer out of how much she used to charge … I mean, we used to track the pictures through the web so we could give you a rough idea. If it’s on 30 sites, we know their traffic, we know what page they went to roughly, ‘we could say 50 million people saw your picture across the world, 65 countries yesterday just by going by website traffic, Kim.’ So then she’d go back to the bling companies and say, ‘hey, I want a hundred thousand now just to wear that for my next shoot.’ So how many things she was dressed head to toe in? I’d say pretty much everything from earrings to clips in her hair to the bikinis to whatever the hell she wore, everything would be paid for pretty much. So she’d be making hundreds of thousands per picture, easily.”
Morgan continued:
“If she’s wearing a bracelet from Chanel and they decided they might have to give her a hundred thousand for that, if she’s got 10 things in that picture, she may have to wear it 5, 6, 7 times and get shot. But she’ll make hundred thousands from a setup if you like.”
Wow! Seems pretty smart to us. No wonder she’s a mogul now!!
Related: Kim Is Now Officially ‘Putting Herself Out There’ To Date Again!
The ex-Splash News head went on to add:
“We used to make hundreds of thousands from selling the pictures to the news magazines. You could get easily get a hundred thousand dollars for Kim Kardashian at the beach. Back in the mid-nineties if you wanted to get the front page of People or US Magazine, or if you wanted to run it in News of the World and Us Magazine and New York Post and someone else in Australia ran it at exactly the same time then you’re making bank. But you were splitting that also with a photographer and with a celebrity. But for us it just made us look bigger and bigger and bigger, obviously.”
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Kim is firmly an A-lister and an icon in the reality world now. But clearly, she was shrewd and cunning and aggressive on her way up the ladder. Guess you’ve gotta be like that!
Related: Confirmed! Kim WILL Be At This Year’s Met Gala!
Ch-ch-check out the full interview (below) or click HERE to listen on audio!
Pretty fascinating!!
Reactions, Perezcious readers??
[Image via MEGA/WENN]