Clipping — the practice of chunking up long-form videos into 30- to 60-second clips for consumption on social media — has been shunted up the news agenda this month for a couple of reasons.
First, a rock band called Geese was decried as a ‘psyop’ after the founders of marketing agency Chaotic Good explained on a podcast how they engineered the group’s popularity on social media by creating thousands of accounts and using them to share clips, a process they’ve called ‘trend simulation’.
Second, OpenAI paid $200 million for TBPN, a video podcast that receives just 7,000 views per episode but begets clips that amass hundreds of thousands of views*. TBPN monetises those clips, too, with ‘brought to you by…’ messages at the end of each one.
Clip views don’t explain TBPN’s valuation, of course. Only OpenAI knows why it paid so much for the podcast. And anyway, its ad revenue is likely to decline now that it is no longer independent — not least because Elon Musk has already been accused of throttling TBPN’s reach on X because of his animosity towards OpenAI. But the role that clipping has played in building TBPN’s audience neatly demonstrates a shift taking place in social media.
In September, The Ankler reported on the then burgeoning clipping economy. It interviewed 22-year-old Max Peterson, founder of an agency called Clip, who explained how he used Discord to organise a network of 16,000 — mostly teenage — ‘clippers’.
Clippers are typically paid based on how their posts perform. In the Ankler article, Peterson said that between January and September he’d paid $500,000 to 1,300 clippers. And since then, the practice has become even more lucrative. In February, streamer N3on (real name Rangesh Mutama) claimed he spent close to $1m per month on clipping, and that his highest-performing clipper was earning around $170,000 per month. Naturally, AI companies are now promising to make those legions of young clippers redundant.
Originally, the incentive to clip was to drive people to consume longer-form media. According to Quickplay, 71% of Gen Z get TV and movie recommendations by scrolling short-form videos. And if you think about clipping as just a new form of product sampling for movie studios and record labels, it seems benign enough.
But clipping is increasingly becoming an end in itself, and it may be distorting the already-warped reality presented to users of social media.
According to Prof G Media, only 16,000 people tune in to Clavicular’s livestream, but the success of his clips creates the impression of a prominent(ish) media and cultural personality, worthy of a profile in The New York Times.
If it were just the case that people now like to consume most video media in clip form, there would be no issue, because producing good clips would just be a new form of popularity. But the accounts created by armies of paid clippers are indistinguishable from real fan accounts, which makes the practice a bit more pernicious.
As education platform Let’s Data Science explains, ‘this is not just a music-marketing story. It exposes a growing gap between what platforms surface and what real audience intent looks like.’
It seems likely then that platforms will try to fix the vulnerabilities that allow clippers to exploit recommendation algorithms by mimicking genuine early-engagement signals.
While social media has not shown much willing or competence in tackling harmful content, it has usually been quick to shut down avenues for third parties to siphon value from their platforms.
Still, the importance of clipping to the media landscape is real and will outlast the shady practices of those that exploit it. And if I had to take an early punt on what will be media’s word of the year in 2026, clipping would be it.
* This figure is only for clips seeded by the creators themselves, not the re-posts by other accounts.