Reality shows are fun for everyone. Many of us watched the MTV hit “Laguna Beach” over and over again. It made us all say “Steven” like “Stee-Vehn” and throw our own black-and-white parties. Fans met famous people like Lauren Conrad (aka LC) and Kristin Cavallari for the first time on the show, but it wasn’t a very well-paid job. According to Cosmopolitan, Cavallari and Stephen Colletti said on their podcast that MTV only paid $2,000 to $2,500 for the whole first season. What a crazy thing!
After “Laguna Beach,” Conrad wrote a series called “The Hills.” IMDb says that the reality TV show ran from 2006 to 2010, and it was about LC when she was an intern at Teen Vogue. Some of Conrad’s friends, like Heidi Montag, Audrina Patridge, and Whitney Port, were also on the show. Spencer Pratt was one of the most talked-about reality stars at the time, and “The Hills” is the show that brought him to the world’s attention.
Conrad talked about her time on reality TV in an interview with Entertainment Tonight in 2021. It seems like she didn’t have the best memories of her time on the show. When asked if she would watch “New Beginnings,” the show’s revival, LC said she hadn’t seen it. “I don’t watch any reality TV, to be honest. It sets me off a little bit!” Even so, she and the rest of the cast made a lot of money from the show, so it turned out to be a good idea.
Lauren Conrad takes the cake by a hair
When it comes to p ay on “The Hills,” there is one person who stands out. Heidi Montag says that Lauren Conrad earned the most money from the series. Montag talked about the issue with BuzzFeed. “Cast members made different amounts of money, so we wanted to do what “Jersey Shore” did and work together to get a bigger paycheck for everyone, but everyone was a little too split,” she told the outlet in 2016. “I mean, Lauren got the most money because it was her show. She was on the road between Laguna and the Hills.” Her bigger paycheck might have helped her pay for gas to go back and forth.
So, how much money did Conrad bring back? We’d say that’s a pretty penny! The Daily Beast says that Conrad made $125,000 per episode. In her contract, it also said that no one could be paid more than her as long as she was in the series. That’s a smart way to run a business. The other people on the show also got paid pretty well for being on it, so they didn’t have much to complain about either. The same article says that Kristin Cavallari made $90,000 per episode and Montag made close to $100,000 per episode. Audrina Patridge and Lauren “Lo” Bosworth were both close to making $100,000 per episode. Spencer Pratt, who is married to Montag, made $65,000 per episode, which is still enough to buy a nice whip.
Lauren Conrad’s TV fame paid off
In reality TV, there are many ways to make money, and money from the show is just one of them. Celebrity Net Worth says that Conrad has an impressive $40 million in the bank, and only a small part of that comes from the reality shows she has been in. The 37-year-old also makes a lot of money from her clothing line, The Lauren Conrad Collection. Glamour says that the growing brand is responsible for 42% of the sales at Kohl’s, where it is sold, and that the company makes about $19 billion (that’s billion with a b) a year. So, she must make a good living just from that!
Heidi Montag’s net worth is somewhere around $300,000, according to Wealthy Gorilla, but it used to be a lot more. People says that Montag and her husband Spencer Pratt, who were known as “Speidi” when they were on “The Hills,” lost a lot of money. In the interview, the reality show couple said that between their hit show and other things like paid appearances, they made about $2 million a year, but they let it all go. “We were trying to keep up with the Joneses, but Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were ahead of us,” Pratt told the outlet. “We should have stuck to watching reality TV.” Montag said the same thing as her husband, and she took the blame. “Our business managers told us to stop spending, but we acted like we knew what we were doing.”
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