Why Are the Kardashians Everywhere? Cashmore Turns to the Audience

Ellis Cashmore’s Kardashian Kulture promises to explain how celebrities changed life in the twenty-first century. In its final chapter, he calls that subtitle misleading: celebrities cannot exist without public recognition. Audiences help make the fame whose influence they then experience.

That is a more productive starting point than the familiar question, “What did these people do to become famous?” But Cashmore’s answer goes beyond “We keep watching them.” He shows how viewers gain access to someone else’s everyday life, grow accustomed to judging their conduct and eventually find themselves among the potential customers. A sense of familiarity makes it easier to move between these roles.

The Kardashians are not his only subject. Cashmore takes readers from Elizabeth Taylor and Madonna through Paris Hilton to family reality television and social media. Chapters on womanhood, sexuality, racial identities and the self contribute to a larger attempt to explain changing cultural norms. The most interesting development is how audiences learned to treat other people’s lives as entertainment, an invitation to moral judgment and a commodity at the same time.

A fan is already a potential customer

In “Influential Presence,” Cashmore sets scathing reviews of Paris Hilton’s films and music alongside the commercial value of her presence. Critics asked whether she could act or sing. Advertisers were buying something else: an image audiences already recognized and discussed. Hilton did not merely endorse products; her name became part of what was being sold.

The final chapter, “Leveraged Fame,” develops this mechanism through Kylie Jenner’s cosmetics business. She grew up in front of the cameras on the family’s reality show, then sold cosmetics to an audience that knew her before the product existed. Fans and customers are not entirely separate populations to acquire from scratch.

Sequence matters. This is not the story of an unknown entrepreneur starting with an empty profile. Established attention helps introduce the merchandise. The case cannot show that a good product alone earns equivalent recognition, or that audience size guarantees sales.

For a small Ukrainian brand, the useful lesson is a way to examine an advertising offer, rather than a dream of replicating Jenner’s success. Consider a hypothetical cosmetics business that communicates in Ukrainian and ships only within Ukraine. Before working with an influencer, it should examine where the audience lives and which language it uses; after a trial placement, it should compare visits with orders. Someone else’s recognition has value when it provides access to people who can and want to buy this particular product.

The pleasure of passing judgment

“Public Privacy” explains what helps sustain that attention. Cashmore begins with tabloids exposing the hidden lives of stars, then moves through confessional television and reality shows. More than the quantity of information changes. Participants increasingly offer their own private lives for inspection, while viewers acquire a standing invitation to decide who is behaving well, absurdly or appallingly.

This is a stronger explanation than curiosity about the wealthy alone. Judgment brings its own reward: outrage at someone’s extravagance, laughter at an unfortunate outfit, a feeling of moral superiority. Admiration is not essential to such a connection. A person can remain an object of attention without being liked.

The critic, then, is not always outside the circle being criticized. They may never buy the cosmetics, yet continue circulating the image. That does not make every scandal profitable. It does explain why a lack of affection need not end participation in someone else’s popularity.

Nor is the book simply a celebration of the sovereign consumer. In “Emasculated Womanhood,” Cashmore examines the dispute over female empowerment sold alongside consumer goods. Someone can control the production of their image without controlling its reception; they can feel more confident without gaining greater power over the conditions of their life. That tension gives the book more to offer than another catalogue of successful advertising campaigns.

The platform stands between audience and star

Published in 2019, the book’s history of intimacy and commerce still helps make sense of media. But an explanation centered on audience choice needs another participant: the platform also decides what appears before our eyes. Cashmore already mentions Facebook’s personalization. Today, that intermediary deserves a more central place in the discussion.

In Instagram’s official explanation of May 31, 2023, ranking signals include likes, shares, saves and comments; Feed also includes recommended posts from accounts a person does not follow. In a January 2026 statement, Meta again describes changes to its ranking and recommendation systems. These are the platform’s own explanations, not an independent audit of its results. Their importance here is different: a commercial selection process operates between our curiosity and the next post we see. An angry comment can count as an interaction, but it is not an instruction to the algorithm to distribute a post, much less a purchase.

There is also a material limit to the idea that scandal is a resource. According to the SEC’s October 3, 2022 release, preserved in an October 13, 2026 archive snapshot, Kim Kardashian agreed to settle a case concerning undisclosed payment for promoting EthereumMax tokens and to pay $1.26 million in combined penalties, disgorgement and interest. She neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s findings. This was a specific US case, not a rule for advertising in Ukraine. It shows what attention alone cannot remove: a paid recommendation can have financial consequences for the person making it.

The original works best as a cultural history of these relationships. Cashmore writes with verve and provocation, moving between decades and explaining change through juxtaposed stories. That supplies a sense of development a single formula about the attention economy cannot reproduce. A broad conclusion about social change, however, does not become a demonstrated causal model merely because its examples fit together neatly. Old estimates of fortunes, audiences and advertising rates should not inform present-day calculations.