It’s already been well documented that Ja Rule’s luxury music festival, Fyre Fest, was a complete disaster. The festival was canceled before it really began, for reasons like there weren’t enough toilets or tents on the festival grounds. One thing it did have enough of were Instagram models and celebrities, whose paid social media endorsements turned out to be an easy way to get paid and trick rich kids into spending a lot of money for a terrible experience.

Nice for Kendall, bad for everyone else

A recent report by Vice (and spotted by The Wrap) claims that Fyre Fest organizers paid Kendall Jenner $250,000 for a single Instagram post about the festival, which she has since deleted. None of the “influencers” who advertised the fest were paid less than $20,000 for an Instagram post, according to the report.

Celebrities making a lot of money for sponsored Instagram posts is nothing new. In 2016, Forbes reported that Kim Kardashian makes around $300,000 per post, and her sisters also make hundreds of thousands. But Fyre Fest seems to have put these sponsored posts at the top of their priorities list. The organizers reportedly knew months in advance that there was no way they could pull this off, and yet they spent huge amounts of money and resources on Instagram advertising.

And yet, it worked. People actually paid thousands of dollars to go to this festival, apparently based on little more than a supermodel on Instagram telling them to buy tickets. But you know who didn’t buy a ticket or go to the festival? Kendall Jenner.



[The Verge]