‘The Neighborhood Talk’ CEO Kyle Simpson and the business of celebrity gossip

There's no doubt about it — The Neighborhood Talk is one of the biggest Black celebrity blogs to date with a heavy presence on Instagram. The outlet boasts over 1.7 million followers on the platform, as of Jan. 19, and gets the edge against other competitors with alleged screenshot DMs and detailed timely posts.

Recently, the outlet's founder and CEO Kyle Simpson, spoke to rolling out about his journey to becoming a boss and navigating the business world of media.

How did The Neighborhood Talk come about?

Well, I used to work for this blog called The Shade Room and things, just to summarize it quickly, went left. To be honest, I got fired in December 2018.

I just remembered telling myself, "OK. What are you going to do? What's your next step?" I didn't think any other company would hire me after getting fired from a big company like that. So, I just decided to start my own blog, The Neighborhood Talk. By luck, people followed me from my old job, and it took off.

How many followers did you have on your page when The Shade Room let you go?

I was good at writing articles. I wrote my articles in a way where I put my personality into them and people were able to associate that with me. I was going on talk shows like "The Real," and I built a portfolio up while I was over there.

How many followers did you have? Like 10 or 20,000?

On my personal page, I probably only had like 100,000 at the time.

Only 100,000? That's a lot.

I guess that's a lot. What I learned was, that if you write a lot of articles, people will follow you.

How did you learn the financial aspect of running a media company? 

At The Shade Room, they kept the ad revenue separate, but I learned if you're posting 10 ads a day, I'm seeing an ad sheet and the price is like $800 for one ad, then you charge them as you go up in numbers. I adopted that method.

When I started, I was at $500, but now we're at $950 for one ad. Depending on if you're a larger company, like BET or networks, you up the price.

I learned, while being at The Shade Room, to be flexible with people, but when it comes to big corporations, you want to go for that top dollar.

How do you turn attention into money?

People might get annoyed with Blueface and Chrisean, but they do well on the page. They do bring in the numbers. From an advertising standpoint, I told my team the page needs to look like you're going into a store. Everything needs to have some type of engagement on it. Because if I'm an advertiser, and I'm scrolling quickly and you don't have any comments or likes, why am I going to want to promote my stuff on your page? So, I just try to find stuff where we can get over 1,000 comments and likes because the advertisers see that.