Our social networks are flooded with clips. Big names like Justin Bieber, reality shows like RuPaul’s Drag Raceand even AI companies like Perplexity – all using short video segments to advertise on social media. And they don’t just publish from their own accounts; They are paying thousands of anonymous people to do it for them.
This practice, a marketing tactic known as clipping, is everywhere and continues to spread. The Verge’s Mia Sato recently wrote an article analyzing how this practice works and how it could be an existential threat to richer, more nuanced content.
Sato spoke with Today, explained Co-host Sean Rameswaram tells us why everything is a clip now, the companies behind it, and what’s next.
Below is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so give it a listen Today, explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
How would you describe what’s happening on our Instagram feeds?
It’s basically the TL;DR-ification of the entire Internet. It truncates everything we do and it comes down to “We need a way for people to discover our content.” And right now, the way to get people to discover content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is.
Think political videos. You see Trump giving a speech that Aaron Rupar is posting. Or the highlight of last night’s sports game. This is seen when each podcast is converted into a video. A big reason why it happened was because they needed something to put on TikTok, on Reels, on YouTube Shorts.
What made you want to write about this now?
The reason I felt like we needed to have a conversation about it is because of Clavicular.
Clavicular is actually a great example where the goal of their online existence is clips rather than full live streams. They know it through these short disembodied videos of this other thing that exists, but that no one sees. And you have this person who comes out of the shadows to get a 60-minute interview.
I wanted to take this example to illustrate a broader point about the nature of content on the Internet and how people work to go viral.
Is there a difference between the podcast clips we talked about at the beginning of the show and what Clavicular is doing?
Clavicular is basically the industrialized version of a podcast that simply posts its own clips organically. The difference is that underneath there is an ecosystem that is paid.
During the month between March and April, I think there were around 1,600 clippers working on your behalf, generating tens of thousands of videos, billions of views, and all of that is paid. People get paid to post this content and are paid based on the number of views the clips get. And so it’s completely a game of scale. It’s about trying to take full advantage of the algorithms of social platforms. These pseudo-anonymous accounts profit based on how much these clips appear across all of our feeds.
How much money can you earn here?
[Clavicular] monitors 62,000 clippers on its platform. Some people earn tens of thousands of dollars a month. He says the average is about $3,000 a month. It’s no big deal. Is it enough to support a family? Can you support a family with paperclips? Maybe not. But brands are paying companies like this snipping platform; [they] Basically, let’s say, here’s $10,000, make us go viral.
What type of companies are paying for this service?
I was a little surprised at how many well-known names were using this type of service. RuPaul’s Drag Race. There were clip campaigns for AI companies like Perplexity. Dan Bongino, former second-in-command of the FBI, who is now back to being a full-time podcaster. I found cuts campaigns that seemed to be for Obligationsthe video game. Political candidates, which gets really strange. So it really spans different industries. There is definitely variety.
When I scroll through, say, Twitter, I know when something that’s put in front of me is an ad because it will say ad, but I don’t know when I see something organically or when I see something that was paid to be elevated to my feed. And I imagine the same thing happens on Instagram or TikTok? That you’re seeing things that have been forced on you along with things that maybe have organically entered your feed?
Yeah, and I think one of the things that clippers do is create content that looks like it could be combined with organic content.
A rule of thumb I like to share is that you can probably imagine right now, you’re scrolling and you see a clip from Joe Rogan’s podcast. The background is black, and on the black background there will be a caption that says: “I can’t believe bro said that. Surprised emoji.” You know what I mean?
I’ve seen that before. And then watch the video. And then nothing shocking is said and I’m just like, “I hate the Internet.”
There’s a good chance you’ve seen paid clips. One of the campaigns I found was promoting Perplexity through Joe Rogan’s podcast because Perplexity is a sponsor of the podcast. So these clippers were hired to produce a bunch of clips of Joe Rogan talking about Perplexity, and it would be difficult, unless you checked the hashtags, to see that it was paid content. Buried in the hashtags, it says “Powered by Perplexity,” “sponsored hashtag.”
Even that is a better example of disclosure. Much of this content is undisclosed. You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not, even, as I mentioned, I found some political candidates hiring clippers. There was a candidate in Florida, a Republican congressional candidate, who was running a cuts campaign without disclosure, which I understand is against the law.
It really is the Wild West because many of these companies do not disclose that they are paying these bills.
Can I read you the most depressing couple of sentences from the article you wrote? That I sent to a lot of people who were like, How depressing is this?
“But over-indexing the trimmed version means that the full content is ultimately a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and they make it to the Internet, you start to wonder what justifies making the content full and untrimmed in the first place.”
It’s so brutal because some of these things that are being cut are clever.
Yes. I will say that I wrote those really depressing sentences because I feel this way.
I am an article writer. I write long stuff that is thousands of words long and is often behind a paywall. I make clips of my stories. I do the short form video thing. I talk on my phone and tell my stories to the public, and I know that very, very few people who watch that video will actually look up my story and read it.
I wonder if you think, after having written this article about “The Clippening,” as you call it, if this is just our moment or if it is ours forever.
For me, it’s very difficult to see a way out of vertical video because it’s so dominant right now. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should completely trust the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm because you don’t want to trust a technology platform that can change things in an instant and you will have no control over it.
I think the balance is, if you’re someone who wants new people to know about your show or your story or whatever, maybe you need to be in a short-form video. But how do you make it so that the sad quotes I wrote in my story don’t become reality, where the clips are the justification instead of creating the longer version, real art or real journalism or whatever? How do you avoid that as much as possible?