Kim Kardashian’s self-imposed exile from social media may end up costing her millions of dollars more than the original Parisian robbery.
Her social media accounts went dark after she was held up at gunpoint by a group of men and robbed of $11 million worth of jewelry in her luxury apartment at the Hôtel de Pourtalès in early October.
Because she’s a celebrity whose brand stems from sharing and monetizing her daily activities, staying out of the public eye is akin to losing a job for Kardashian — and she’s paying for it.
Kardashian’s brand could lose some $3.6 million during the blackout, based on calculations culled from this year’s earnings — which were $51 million, according to Forbes estimates.
The reality TV star is staying off her Instagram, with 86.6 million followers, and Twitter, where she has 48.9 million followers. She makes an estimated $300,000 per sponsored post on those sites, according to social media management platform Captiv8.
She previously made a sponsored post an average of once a week, the company said, promoting brands like SugarBearHair vitamins and Waist Gang Society on her accounts.
Kardashian has been silent on social media for 42 days — a long hiatus by many standards in 2016, but practically early retirement for a member of the Kardashian family, which has built an empire on oversharing.
For a high-profile celebrity like Kardashian, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorship money per week is relatively inconsequential, said celebrity financial adviser Samuel Rad.
“Her income is already affected, but I don’t think she cares because she’s got a lot of money and that’s one of the advantages of being a celebrity — she isn’t relying on this income to live off it,” he said.
“She’s got plenty of other investments and assets generating her income on a monthly or annual basis.”
Those other investments include “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” the E! reality show that launched the family to fame, as well as her personal ventures like the Kimoji app, her merchandise store, her pay-walled lifestyle app, and her online game, which made more than $100 million between its launch in 2014 and February 2016.
Although all of those assets are separate from her social media profiles, they are inextricably linked — she often unboxes new merchandise on her Snapchat to promote it or informs her Instagram followers of new emojis in the Kimoji app.
Her last tweet before the social media blackout even called on users to meet her digital counterpart at a location in the virtual world of her game for a “special surprise.”
Public figures with large social followings like hers have created “unparalleled power” for distribution, according to Niccolo de Masi, chief executive of Glu Mobile, the company behind Kardashian’s game.
He recently told the Los Angeles Times that the company is hoping she returns to social media.
“If she decided never to return to social media, the world would mourn the loss of Kim Kardashian online,” he said.
Kardashian herself has acknowledged the large role social played in her career, telling Recode’s Kara Swisher, “Without social media, I don’t know what the life span of the show would have been, what our careers would be.”
The reality TV show, which follows the lives of Kim and her famous family, took a hiatus from filming following the robbery. It’s likely to return to a boost in ratings, says Rad, who envisions a major comeback following Kardashian’s time off the grid.
“When she does come back, it’s going to make it that much more important — her first sightings are going to be that much more rare,” he said. “She will come back even harder.”
Luckily for Kardashian, even though she is taking a break, her fans aren’t going anywhere yet. Captiv8 found that even though the star has been silent online, her following is steadily increasing. Last week, she gained 400,000 new followers in five days despite not having posted anything, it found.
“Her fans have an emotional connection to her,” said Captiv8 co-founder Krishna Subramanian. “She is an icon and she can take a break and come back and things will be fine.”
[Source:-The New Yourk Times]
