Clippers Build Shadow Economy Turning Long-Form Content Into Paid Short Videos

Emrah Bayraktar, a 25-year-old from Antwerp, Belgium, once cleaned cars, worked a night shift in a warehouse and made sandwiches at a Subway. One night he earned $12 from an Instagram clip edited from a long influencer interview. Two weeks later he made $2,500 from similar clips and quit his jobs to focus on the work full time.

Bayraktar now runs a network of 40,000 freelance clippers and operates a YouTube channel teaching others how to enter the field. Clippers are paid per view they generate on certain websites instead of through affiliate link purchases. The average age of his contract clippers is between 16 and 24 years old.

Clippers inundate social media platforms with bite-sized clips of podcast interviews, sports games, films and other long-form content. They often upload dozens of the same clips to multiple platforms hoping one will go viral. Content Rewards and Vyro serve as online marketplaces connecting marketing agencies with clippers for clip-for-cash campaigns.

One agency offered $1 per 1,000 views of clips of Major League Baseball games. An artificial intelligence startup offered $25 for every 1,000 views of clips about its product. Polymarket offered 50 cents per thousand views with a total budget of $70,000 for clippers.

Anthony Fujiwara, the co-founder of the agency Clipping, said clipping increases the chance of being seen as users scroll on their phones. "Clipping makes it so you have a higher chance to be featured on these phones, instead of someone driving past your content on a billboard, it's now someone swiping past it as they scroll," he said.

Roy Lee, who co-founded the artificial intelligence startup Cluely, hired more than 700 clippers.

The effort produced tens of millions of views for Cluely's products. " "The people running these accounts are hungry Slovakian teenagers," Roy Lee said. Bo Lucenko, a 19-year-old college freshman studying marketing who lives in the Chicago suburbs, makes around $4,000 a month clipping for influencers and tech founders.

"In a clipper's mind, there's always micro things you can do to make something go viral," Lucenko said. " Ed Elson co-hosts the podcast Prof G Markets with Scott Galloway. Hasan Piker's average livestream racks up about 33,000 views while his average clip is viewed more than 700,000 times.

Ed Elson said multiple people approached him on the street recognizing him from clips rather than the podcast. And they said, 'No I don't listen to the podcast, but I love your clips,'" he said. Ed Elson added: "That's when I realized that's where people are consuming all of my content in this one strange medium that I use to write-off as practically my advertising tool.

Npr reported that social media platforms encourage clips through algorithmic promotion while also cracking down on pages filled with duplicate clips that can appear spammy. Marketing consultant Lou Paskalis said the clip economy allows arbitrage players to repackage content in ways that do not always satisfy consumers, deliver value to advertisers or let original creators monetize their work.

Npr reported that Bayraktar's career illustrates a broader shadow economy operating across TikTok, Instagram, X and YouTube.