Speaker Fees 2023 and the rise of Virtual Speeches

Speaker fees 2023

How much would you be willing to pay?

These are my highlights from an essay: Inside the wild, drug-fueled world of celebrity keynote speakers by David Kushner

👉🏼 Boxer Sugar Ray Leonard gives 40 speeches a year, for upward of $100,000 a pop

👉🏼 Companies are spending an estimated $2 billion a year for celebrity speakers to inspire and entertain their pandemic-weary troops.

👉🏼 It can cost over $500,000, plus luxury travel expenses, for an hourlong keynote by Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Q&A with Serena Williams.

👉🏼 And since COVID-19 hit, a lucrative new market has opened up for celebrity talks via Zoom. In 2019, "virtual speeches" accounted for less than 5% of CAA's paid appearances. Today they're close to 70%.

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Fear of public speaking — known as glossophobia —is a common anxiety, even among big-name stars.

After getting booked on a college lecture tour in 1967, Andy Warhol was so eager to bail that he dispatched the actor Allen Midgette to secretly impersonate him on the road.

Midgette donned the artist's famous wig and Delphic manner of speaking, collecting the $600 payments. It was only after a suspicious appearance at the University of Utah in 1968 when an investigation by the campus paper forced Warhol to admit to using a double.

"He was better than I am," Warhol explained. "He's what people expected. They liked him better than they would've liked me."

Link to Business Insider story 

https://www.businessinsider.com/celebrity-speaker-wild-money-drugs-alcohol-hunter-thompson-2023-4?amp