Interview with Kim Kardashian on her hit game, aspirations in tech, and plans to create more apps
After Conquering Reality TV, Kim Kardashian Is Taking the Mobile World By Storm — Kim Kardashian West first grabbed our attention in October 2007 with the premiere of E!'s Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
Context & Ripple Effects
This Adweek interview lands at the peak of the celebrity-mobile-game wave: weeks earlier, Glu Mobile had announced it would extend the same engine behind Kim Kardashian: Hollywood to a Katy Perry title, making Kardashian the proof-of-concept for licensing star power into freemium apps.
The arc since is instructive — the game grossed $156M across its first stretch, Glu was absorbed by Electronic Arts in a $2.4B deal built largely around that one franchise, and by 2024 Kardashian confirmed the game would shut down. Reading the 2015 interview now means reading the founding document of a business model that has since run its course.
First-order effects
- Kardashian is positioning herself as more than talent-for-hire: stated plans for additional apps shift her role from licensed name toward product owner with recurring revenue tied to her personal brand.
- Glu Mobile gains a template it immediately exploits — converting one celebrity hit into a pipeline of star-driven games rather than a one-off.
Second-order effects
- Other celebrities and their agents face pressure to package their audiences into app economics, since the Kardashian deal demonstrates that fame converts directly into install-and-spend revenue without traditional media intermediaries.
- As the app route matures and eventually saturates, the same brand-monetization logic migrates to cheaper channels — Instagram sponsorship of the kind later scrutinized in sponsored-content coverage, and ultimately paid crypto promotion, which ended in Kardashian's $1.26M SEC settlement over an undisclosed EthereumMax post.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, celebrity IP becomes a financializable asset class — evidenced by EA paying a 36% premium for Glu primarily on the strength of a single personality license — while the enforcement perimeter (SEC action on promo posts) grows around how stars monetize their followings.
The trend: Celebrity monetization is moving through a lifecycle — from licensed mobile games at the 2015 peak, to platform consolidation under publishers like EA, to direct social-media promotion now policed by regulators.