In 2025, brands and advertisers are recognizing its potential — and are starting to pour more marketing dollars into clipping, according to three creators interviewed for this article.

Although clipping is a widespread and relatively well-known strategy within the creator community, it is still a bit of a shadow practice in the context of the wider creator marketing world, with little-to-no official regulation or press attention around it. At the moment, few, if any, major advertisers have publicly acknowledged their use of clipping. As a result, there are no public statistics or data reports tracking the growth of clipping as a marketing strategy. But creators have anecdotally shared with Digiday that their income is growing thanks to increased advertiser interest in the method.

James — the operator of the viral X account Internet Hall of Fame, who asked to keep his full name private — said that he had experienced an influx of what he described as “enterprise clients,” or mainstream advertisers focused on selling products rather than growing an individual creator’s audience, into the clipping ecosystem in 2025. He told Digiday that he had made roughly $60,000 through clipping in the past seven months.

“When I say ‘enterprise,’ it’s probably a company that’s bigger than $20 to $100 million of market cap,” he said. “We’ve worked with companies that are in the billions of dollars of market cap [who are investing in clipping].”

How does clipping work?

There are two types of participants in the clipping ecosystem: marketers — the entities who pay for their clips to be posted across socials — and clippers, the individuals who do the posting.

Marketers share specific video files with clippers — both promotional videos and short clips of longer livestreams or videos — and pay them to post the clips across social channels for an agreed-upon fee, typically between $1 and $5, per 1,000 views, with payments capped at a predefined maximum number. After marketers post their so-called “bounties” on one of several platforms that facilitate clipping, clippers will race to post the videos across TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, sharing verified view counts with the marketers to earn their payouts. 

Historically, the majority of clipping activity has been organized through private Discord servers. To commission clips, or to be a clipper, creators had to know someone who could add them to the server. In March, however, the social commerce company Whop launched a dedicated clipping platform in an effort to streamline the practice of clipping — and potentially encourage more mainstream advertisers to commission clips. 

Whop’s platform formalizes the same practices used for clipping on private Discord servers — bounties, view verification and max payouts — but it’s open to the public. Joining Whop is free, with users gleaning their revenue directly through marketers’ payouts and Whop taking a 10 percent cut of all commission fees. 

“We’ve gotten 3.5 billion views across social media, and we’re averaging over 100 million views per day in clipping,” said Whop marketing director Brett Malinowski.

Who are the marketers in the clipping ecosystem?

So far, the most common type of clip marketer is large creators looking to boost their audiences — such as Rob the Bank, David Ghiyam and Jason Wojciechowicz, who have all spent thousands of dollars on clipping via Whop’s platform. 

The second-most-prominent type is intellectual property holders looking to advertise or boost interest in their IP. Malinowski said that Whop had worked with film and television production companies to promote their releases, but declined to specify their names due to non-disclosure agreements. Currently, the platform publicly displays bounties by musicians such as the All-American Rejects and events like Sneaker Con 2025.

Advertisers that don’t have pre-existing video content are still figuring out how to best take advantage of clipping, but Whop’s platform also features bounties from apps or investment services such as Kalshi, Neurodrops and Autopilot. Investment app Autopilot, for example, has spent over $12,000 on clipping since Whop’s platform launched in March. 

Representatives of all of the brands listed above did not respond to requests for comment regarding their approach to clipping as a creator marketing practice.

Jeremy Whitt, executive media director at full-service agency Hanson Dodge, said that he had observed the rise of clipping within the broader media ecosystem, pointing out that some advertisers were using it to get around the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) guidelines requiring paid ads to be explicitly disclosed as such on social platforms.

“It is clever; it’s a good use of the platforms,” he said. “You get around a lot of the paid-sponsor ad type rules.”

However, Whitt, who mostly works with more traditional advertisers focused on physical rather than digital products, said that he had not yet experienced a significant uptick in clipping interest on the part of his clients. He said that categories of advertisers with a more inherent connection to visual content would be the brands most likely to dip their toes further into clipping in 2025.

Who are the clippers?

For the most part, clippers are content creators of all sizes, who can use different strategies to make money through clipping. Some, such as the aforementioned James, who operates Internet Hall of Fame and other accounts that boast millions of followers, sprinkle paid clips among the numerous viral clips they post daily, transforming their followers’ natural engagement into clipping revenue. Others approach clipping as more of a shotgun blast, using multitudes of faceless accounts — some with only a few followers each — to rack up views and create a sense of organic interest in their clips. 

“I would not be surprised if there’s kids out there making $15,000 or $20,000 a month just from doing this,” James said.

Clipping works as a marketing tool because it taps into the parasocial relationships between creators and their audiences. Fans see creators as tastemakers and can perceive a shared clip as more meaningful, boosting its viral potential. 

“Clipping is effectively curation,” said Yuriy Yarovoy, svp of growth at the company Medal, which helps users make and share gaming clips. “Here’s the pinpointed 30 seconds that is the most important or most relevant, or really captures exactly what the point of this four-hour stream was.”

What are the potential risks of clipping?

FTC guidelines require all paid ads on social channels to be explicitly disclosed as such — which puts clipping activity into a bit of a legal gray area. Some clippers do clearly disclose that they are posting paid ads, but many do not, creating a legal liability for the brands and advertisers working with them.

Jesse Saivar, an IP lawyer at the firm Greenberg Glusker, said that the mainstream advertisers he works with are focused on complying with FTC guidelines and are aware of the risks that come with breaking them. However, he said that smaller brands and creators were extremely unlikely to be punished for violating the FTC’s guidelines due to the government agency’s inability to monitor the sheer volume of paid clips posted on social channels. 

“Is the FTC going to come down on some micro-influencer who’s posted a 30-second video? The reality is almost certainly not, because they just don’t have the bandwidth to do so,” Saivar said. “That is likely why there’s so much out there that that does violate the FTC endorsement guidelines.”

Saivar said that brands that are “already kind of in legal gray areas,” such as investment apps, cryptocurrency firms and AI companies, are more likely to take on the potential risk of advertising through clips that potentially violate FTC guidelines. He added that platforms like Whop, which formalize the clipping process, also take on an inordinate amount of risk in doing so, as they present an easy target for the FTC to curb rule-breaking clipping activity. Whop’s terms and conditions for clippers explicitly require them to follow the FTC’s disclosure guidelines, but the platform does not currently have an enforcement method in place to ensure that all clippers follow these rules all of the time.

“Could the FTC maybe kill a bunch of birds with one stone by going after a middleman? I would think there was some risk there,” Saivar said.