Clipping Viral Social Videos Has Become Big Business

At the beginning of the year, few people knew who Clavicular was. By February, the 19-year-old looksmaxxing (young men who maximize their physical appearance, sometimes through extreme measures) influencer was everywhere, scoring profiles in the New York Times and GQ, walking the runway during New York Fashion Week, inspiring waves of thinkpieces and getting lampooned by “Saturday Night Live.”

From the outside, Clavicular’s rise to popularity felt like a fluke, the result of an online ecosystem that catapults people to viral fame seemingly at random. In reality, Clavicular’s sudden domination is one of the best examples of how effective clipping — cutting and sharing shortform videos from longer videos or livestreams — has become for select creators. Often when creators like Hasan Piker or Jay Shetty seem to blow up overnight, it’s the result of a shortform strategy that’s becoming increasingly common.

Not that cutting short clips is all that new. Organizations have shared edited segments and interviews as long as televised media has existed. Even in the digital sphere, clipping has long been a known tool. Gaming creators, many of whom pioneered the livestreaming trend, have often used shorter clips to promote their streams, and for years, podcasts have published clips to advertise their episodes. 

What’s changed is the ecosystem around clipping.

Instead of the creators themselves making these shortform videos that live on platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, it’s becoming increasingly common for these clips to be made by paid editors. It’s an industry that’s emerged in the past five years and has become increasingly lucrative for both creators and companies created to drive more clips. And it’s not a practice that’s limited to content creators, with marketing campaigns for music artists, TV shows and movies recruiting teams of editors to spot and clip potentially viral moments.

Obtaining the scope of the clipping market is difficult because so many of the clips are designed to look like fan-made content, but it’s clearly become a springboard for new ventures.

Clipping, the Los Angeles startup founded by Anthony Fujiwara, pays editors anywhere from $300 to $1,500 for every 1 million views a clip gets. The company boasted having over 23,300 editors in its roster late last year. Whop, the creator-focused online business space, says it has millions of clippers that have helped the company and its clients cumulatively generate $1.5 billion in sales. It’s such a popular practice that some creators have launched their own clipping companies.

MrBeast (472 million YouTube subscribers) started Vyro last October, and Airrack (18.2 million YouTube subscribers) launched ClipFarm last August, a clipping agency in partnership with Whop. ClipFarm lists HBO Max, the streamer home to Jake and Logan Paul’s “Paul American,” as one of its clients.  

“The importance of clips has only gotten greater as so many social platforms have geared all their algorithms towards supporting shortform video above any other kind of content,” Adam Bumas, the head of research for the internet-focused Garbage Media, told TheWrap. 

Though Twitch doesn’t have a clipping agency, the livestreaming platform has long supported its creators clipping their Twitch streams to promote them across other platforms. Last year, livestreaming on Twitch alone amassed nearly 900 million hours, and the overall livestreaming marketplace increased by 19%, hitting $2.09 billion. And as livestreaming has increased, so has clipping.

“More people are playing around with going live, and then they’re realizing how powerful clipping is,” Dan Clancy, CEO of Twitch, told TheWrap. “This is just crowdsourcing. It’s [user-generated content] editors, if you will. We have UGC creators, and now we have UGC editors.”

An increasingly common practice with a long history 

As with most aspects of the modern internet, the current clipping model likely originated from a less than reputable source. 

In 2021, Andrew Tate, the misogynistic influencer popular in the manosphere who is facing multiple rape and human trafficking charges in several different countries, launched his course Hustler’s University. The course claimed to teach subscribers how to make money passively. As the course gained popularity, Tate financially incentivized his followers to post videos of him on their own social feeds. Hustler’s University shut down in 2022, but the model of paying followers to promote one’s work hung on.

Fujiwara took note of Tate’s shortform strategy. A teenager who started editing YouTube videos when he was 16, Fujiwara cut his teeth in the world of gaming, working with game-focused creators to help grow their followings. A year after Hustler’s University closed, Fujiwara founded Clipping, a startup that counted MrBeast, IShowSpeed and Plaqueboymax among its creator clients. According to Bloomberg, the company generated around $7.7 million in sales in 2025. 

The other major players in the world of clipping have been fairly new additions. Whop’s clipping division is a little over a year old, and MrBeast’s Vyro is only about six months old. 

How clipping works

Creators can always hope their fans will edit their work free of charge. But for those creators who want to flood social media with their content, many turn to clipping services.

The cost of partnering with these agencies varies. For example, a subscription to Clipping can range from $2,500 to $10,000 a month. Lumina Clippers recommends at least $5,000 for an effective campaign, according to its FAQ section. Compensation models for clippers vary by company and can range from a fixed payout to bonuses tied to performance to a combination of the two.

Once the specifics are settled, the creator’s livestream or longer video is then shared with the clipping agency’s pool of editors. Editors can then take on whatever project they feel like. A lot of this discussion happens in fairly public forums. Both Vyro and Clipping use Discord channels to organize their freelance editors, and both have several threads dedicated to giving new editors the resources and guidance they need. Whop’s active campaigns are even more transparent. Many are searchable on the website. At the time of writing this, Airrack was looking for editors to make clips of his latest train stunt, and there was an active campaign to post clips from Luc Besson’s 2025 film “Dracula” to TikTok. 

As the “Dracula” campaign indicates, this isn’t just a creator-specific trend. An insider who works with a clipping company told TheWrap that nearly all of the major music studios utilize clipping services and that it’s becoming common for movie campaigns to do so as well.

“It’s really a contemporary extension of what brands have always done,” the insider said.

The practice is becoming so vital to the digital ecosystem that at least one creator-focused management and content studio has incorporated clipping directly into its business strategy. Fixated, Zach Katz and Jason Wilhelm’s company, which secured a $50 million investment from Eldridge Industries, has its own network of microinfluencers that clip videos posted by Fixated’s clients and post into their own feeds.

“We want to guarantee eyeballs to our creators,” Wilhelm previously told TheWrap.

@stevengoessomewhere It was literally a movie at the @bbno$ show 100/10 recommend #bbno #bbnomoney #babynomoney ♬ original sound – Steven Goes Somewhere

A major boost in viewership

And a successful clipping campaign certainly generates eyeballs. Let’s go back to Clavicular. He averages about 15,000 viewers per Kick livestream, according to Stream Charts. But Garbage Day discovered that three viral clips edited from his streams that were posted by other accounts amassed more than 44.2 million views in total. 

There are other, less controversial examples. Indie video game developer cakez77, who has 14,500 followers on Twitch, recently went viral for his emotional reaction after learning how many people had purchased his game. As for paid efforts, a Clipping Culture campaign with the very online Canadian rapper bbno$ resulted in more than 13,000 videos and over 2 billion views. Clip Farm claims it generated 64 million views for the comedian Druski for $10,000.

While the results are enticing, any time someone hands over their reputation to an outside source, there’s a risk on how they may be perceived. 

Five months ago, Hasan Piker went viral for a clip from his livestream that seemed to show him shocking his dog with a dog collar. It’s unknown if that clip went viral organically or not. Regardless, it stands as a good example of how a creator can lose control over their own narrative through others clipping their content. That’s especially true as the practice has evolved.

“The biggest change is that there’s a lot more attention being placed on the clips as if they are entire works in their own right, rather than just part of the stream or the larger persona of the streamer,” Bumas said.

“In the past, [clippers] focused on quality over quantity, and now I think they focus more on quantity. They let the algorithms of the shortform content platforms figure out the quality,” Clancy said.

As clipping has evolved, both creators and editors have gotten better at figuring out what’s going to generate views. Bumas noted that clips that show “the most combative moments, the most inflammatory statements, the opinions that are hardest to back up” are the most likely to perform. There’s even a too-online term for this — clip farming, the act of intentionally creating short controversial moments in the middle of a stream for the express purpose of going viral. Think of it as live streamed clickbait. Stream sniping is also increasingly popular, which is when someone appears unexpectedly in someone else’s stream and does something outrageous to get attention.

Livestreaming in general may be evolving, but the practice of clipping isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

“The larger trend towards shortform video means that clipping companies aren’t going anywhere,” Bumas said. “The thing that would make them go anywhere is if there were types of content being promoted and sought out by these companies that weren’t shortform video.”

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