Pouring cold water on paid plugs by celebs

THE

stern warning that the Federal Trade Commission issued to 90 celebrity “influencers” for paid product endorsements on social media could put a crimp in a booming and largely unregulated $1 billion-ayear business.

Celebrities including Kim, Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian, Rihanna, Gigi Hadid, Michael Phelps and LeBron James are believed to be reaping big bucks from the arrangements they make to plug brands.

“It’s become a real alternative to traditional media,” said Evan Asano, CEO of Mediakix, a marketing company for brands that use Instagram and other social media.

Brands may have to be more careful about their spends to avoid trig- gering a backlash, he said.

“Celebrities can make $100,000 to $250,000 or more from these endorsements,” said Gil Eyal, CEO at HYPR, an influencer search engine that works with brands, not the celebrities.

There are as many as 50,000 sponsored posts a month, Eyal said.

Asano at Mediakix put potential paydays even higher — at as much as $500,000 for a single post if the celeb’s following is top shelf.

The biggest stars can pull in millions of dollars annually — some even reaching eight figures.

Instagram has emerged as the favored outlet, surpassing YouTube and Snapchat, said Asano.

The FTC on Wednesday would not disclose who actually received the 90 notices but warned if the endorsements are paid for by a sponsor, it must be prominently disclosed in a post because it constitutes an ad.

It’s the first time the FTC has actually reached out directly to the celebrity set.

The FTC acted after receiving complaints in September from Public Citizen and three other consumer watchdog groups.

“The ‘influencer’ industry on Instagram represents one of the most prominent and ethically egregious violations of FTC policy,” Public Citizen and three other watchdog groups — Commercial Alert, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Center for Digital Democracy — wrote in their complaint.

Verizon gossip

Verizon is rumored to be the public company that is hanging around the hoop on the Time Inc. sales process — waiting to see if it can top any deal for the publisher of People, Time, Sports Illustrated and InStyle.

And as the sales process drags on, the specter of a proxy fight also hangs over the company.

Activist shareholders have until Friday to put forth a slate of board candidates. The annual meeting is in June.

Meredith and a joint venture of Pamplona Capital/Najafi Cos. are the two entities that have been most prominently mentioned as suitors for Time Inc. — but sources close to the situation have been saying all along there is one other undisclosed public company in the mix.

Several stockholders say they believe that company is Verizon, which already owns AOL and is putting the finishing touches on a $4.4 billion purchase of Yahoo — expected to close in late June.

Time Inc. and Verizon both declined to comment.

If a Verizon bid comes to pass, there will be more than a little irony. AOL and Time were together when Time Warner merged with AOL in 2000 in what is widely seen as one of the most disastrous mergers of all time.

Time Warner spun off AOL in 2009, and AOL was subsequently acquired by Verizon in 2015. Time was spun off from Time Warner in 2014.

Meredith, still regarded as the No. 1 Time Inc. suitor, is believed to be trying to keep a price below $20 a share.

“I hope [Time Executive Chairman] Joe Ripp is not going to walk away from a transformative deal because of a $100 million difference in the ask and bid,” one Time shareholder said.

Downsized

The Newhouse family, which owns Condé Nast, is no longer looking for outside investors to join its venture company, Advance Vixeid Partners.

In fact, the investment arm has been brought back in-house and even changed its name to Advance Venture Partners. Despite limited success in the past as it tried to diversify from its old print base, the billionaire family, headed by octogenarian Donald Newhouse, says it can do the investment thing all alone. They had filed with the SEC to seek outside funding back in 2015 — a plan that has now been scrapped. Andy Siegel, the former Yahoo and General Electric executive, who was heading it when it was still known as Advance Vixeid, was put into an operational role with the company’s American City Business Journals back in February. A second executive at Vixeid, JohnJ Murray, left the company, while a third, David ibnAle, was put in charge of the newly named fund. He is working primarily out of the San Francisco office. Last year, it made only one investment. This year it invested $10 million for a minority stake in Lorne Michaels’ Above Average, which produces comedy videos. Sources close to the family say they are only looking to take minority stakes in early- to mid-stage investments.