GoKawiilEarlier this year, after a tumultuous period serving as the former second-in-command at the FBI, Dan Bongino went back to what he is perhaps known best for: video podcasting. After Bongino exited the role in January, he began promotion for the return of his podcast, The Dan Bongino Show. He bought out a billboard in Times Square in New York; he dropped teaser videos for his first new episode in months. Bongino also deployed a more experimental promotional tactic, aimed at getting portions of his show in front of a wider audience. For this, he used clippers.
Clippers are largely anonymous social media accounts whose sole purpose is to rack up views. The accounts take a piece of longform content — an hours-long livestream, for example, or a podcast — and pull out the most exciting, controversial, or shocking moments. Sometimes the accounts are dedicated to clipping, but companies will also recruit accounts with existing followers. Clippers can be based anywhere in the world (one tech founder who uses clippers has described some of them as “hungry Slovakian teenagers”) while targeting English-speaking audiences.
After clippers get the source material that a brand wants to promote, they cut it down and blast their version into the open web. Hundreds or even thousands of clipping accounts might be sharing similar videos, all in competition with one another. You have perhaps learned about a TV show moment, a celebrity podcast appearance, or a new band via clippers without even realizing it; it just looks like someone sharing something. Clippers do not need to be affiliated in any real way with the subjects they are clipping, and the clipped content does not need to be creative, transformative, or even interesting. It is the cartilage of the internet, the placeholders for the algorithm to suck in and spit out.
According to a campaign listing on the service Clipping.net, The Dan Bongino Show started a 31-day campaign beginning the day after his podcast returned in February. There were few requirements or guidelines, only that clippers should pull moments from his new podcast episode, and include #danbongino in the video caption. The campaign ran across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and clippers would be paid $150 for every 100,000 views (with funds dispersed via PayPal). A Discord message about The Dan Bongino Show pegged the budget at $2,000. Bongino’s team did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s just a necessary marketing play that if you’re not doing you’re behind,” Clipping founder Anthony Fujiwara told The Verge in a message. “Clipping lets you abuse the algorithms of other platforms to grow your product exponentially.” Fujiwara says 62,000 clippers use his platform, earning $3,000 a month on average. Most are based in the US.
“We verify using their audiences as a metric for who we want to be a clipper,” he says. “Indian views don’t help anyone.”
If you are someone who wants attention, social media is just just another form of gambling in the age of algorithmic recommendation feeds. Creators and influencers can optimize their content or tweak titles and thumbnails, but ultimately they are all just pulling a virtual slot machine arm, hoping it will dispense views, engagement, and resultant revenue. For well over a decade, content creators have worked to reverse engineer “the algorithm.” Deploying clippers allows companies to gamble on content at scale, without paying a network of contractors upfront: Why bet once, when you could bet 50 times? Clipping is nothing new, despite the recent discourse around who uses it and why, and whether paying random accounts to share content promoting something is deceptive or manufacturing fake fandom. The reality is that more and more, the social internet is filled with clips, paid and unpaid, that stand in for the full-length podcast, video, film, album, or piece of writing. As online content increasingly becomes abstracted from the original work, what purpose does making the full version even serve?
If clips really are the standard for marketing, why the secrecy?
It’s not just podcasters who hire what is essentially a personal army of microtask workers. Clipping.net also lists campaigns for TV shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race ($175 per 100,000 views) and Michael Carbonara, a candidate running for congress in Florida. (The instructions for the campaign note dictate “Your clips must NOT have Michael saying anything Anti-Trump / Anti-White House,” and note that AI-generated clips are acceptable, though.) The brief doesn’t include any instructions for disclosing it is paid content; the Federal Election Commission requires that digital content include disclaimers. Carbonara’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. World of Wonder, the production company for RuPaul’s Drag Race, declined to comment.
On Vyro, another clipping service launched by MrBeast, Perplexity launched a campaign in early April centered around Joe Rogan’s use of AI. (Perplexity is a sponsor of Rogan’s show.) Clippers were instructed to make content based on Rogan discussing AI with guests like Bradley Cooper and Johnny Knoxville, with the AI company specifically mentioned. The campaign ran across Instagram and TikTok, paying $1.20 per one thousand views on a video — and came with more requirements. Accounts were required to have more than 10,000 followers to submit clips, and all posts were to include #PoweredByPerplexity and #sponsored (many clipping campaigns have no disclosures that the content is paid). Reached via email, Perplexity distanced itself from the clipping company, with spokesperson Jesse Dwyer saying Perplexity “has no knowledge” of Vyro and “takes any unauthorized use of the Perplexity name or logo very seriously.” When asked to confirm Perplexity had not run or authorized clipping campaigns, Dwyer stopped responding to The Verge. Vyro directed me to Evangelist, a platform that connects brands with clip farms, but the company declined to comment. If clips really are the standard for marketing — a tool that everyone uses, that is at this point old news — why the secrecy?
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