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Earlier this year, following a brief tenure as the FBI’s deputy director, Dan Bongino returned to what made him a household name: his podcast. After leaving the role in January, he aggressively promoted The Dan Bongino Show with a Times Square billboard and teaser videos. But his most experimental tactic targeted a wider audience through an army of clippers.

Clippers are largely anonymous social media accounts obsessed with generating views. They extract the most provocative moments from longform content,a livestream, a podcast, a TV show,and blast them across the web. Some accounts are dedicated to this task, while brands recruit existing followers. These clippers can operate from anywhere, often targeting English-speaking audiences, and they compete fiercely to share similar videos. You’ve likely encountered a TV show moment, a celebrity interview, or a new band through clippers without realizing it; it just looks like organic sharing. Clippers don’t need affiliation or creativity. They produce the cartilage of the internet, placeholders for algorithms to digest and redistribute.

According to a campaign listing on Clipping.net, The Dan Bongino Show launched a 31-day campaign in February, the day after his podcast returned. The instructions were simple: pull moments from his new episode and include #danbongino. The campaign ran on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, paying $150 per 100,000 views via PayPal. A Discord message 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. “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, with most based in the US. “We verify using their audiences as a metric for who we want to be a clipper,” he adds. “Indian views don’t help anyone.”

For attention-seekers, social media is a form of algorithmic gambling. Creators optimize thumbnails and titles, but ultimately they pull a virtual slot machine arm, hoping for views and revenue. For over a decade, content creators have tried to reverse-engineer “the algorithm.” Deploying clippers allows companies to gamble at scale without upfront costs: why bet once when you can bet 50 times? Clipping isn’t new, despite recent discourse about its ethics. The reality is that the social internet is increasingly filled with clips, paid and unpaid, that stand in for full-length content. As online content becomes abstracted from the original work, what purpose does making the full version serve?

If clips are the standard for marketing, why the secrecy?

It’s not just podcasters who hire this personal army of microtask workers. Clipping.net lists campaigns for RuPaul’s Drag Race ($175 per 100,000 views) and Michael Carbonara, a Florida congressional candidate. His campaign instructions note: “Your clips must NOT have Michael saying anything Anti-Trump / Anti-White House,” and AI-generated clips are acceptable. The brief includes no disclosure instructions, despite Federal Election Commission requirements for digital content disclaimers. Carbonara’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment. World of Wonder, RuPaul’s production company, declined to comment.

On Vyro, a clipping service launched by MrBeast, Perplexity ran a campaign in early April centered on Joe Rogan’s use of AI. (Perplexity sponsors Rogan’s show.) Clippers were instructed to create content based on Rogan discussing AI with guests like Bradley Cooper and Johnny Knoxville. The campaign paid $1.20 per 1,000 views and required accounts with over 10,000 followers. Posts were to include #PoweredByPerplexity and #sponsored, though many clipping campaigns lack disclosures. Perplexity distanced itself from Vyro, with spokesperson Jesse Dwyer saying the company “has no knowledge” of it and “takes any unauthorized use of the Perplexity name or logo very seriously.” When asked to confirm no campaigns were authorized, Dwyer stopped responding. Vyro directed me to Evangelist, another platform, which declined to comment. If clips are a standard marketing tool, why the secrecy?

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the clip economy is Clavicular (real name: Braden Peters), a 20-year-old streamer who rose to fame through viral short videos. He has received mainstream coverage for his obsessive focus on appearance in the “looksmaxxing” subculture. He has used racist slurs, hit his face with a hammer, and sung along to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” with right-wing influencers. You’ve probably never watched his hours-long streams, but you’ve likely seen clips.

According to Peters, over 1,600 clippers farmed content of him between March and April, posting nearly 70,000 videos with over 2 billion views. They clipped him on a fake date, in nightclubs, and being consensually choked until he convulsed. “Everyone hating but as predicted the clip went giga viral,” Peters wrote on X.

The clip ecosystem elevates even unknown personalities, reaching millions who may never see the original material. Peters has around 337,000 followers on Kick, a fraction of others’ followings. Few watch his streams live, which are uneventful except for manufactured moments.

You don’t even need to hire clippers; many will do it for free, or you can recycle everything as clips. TBPN, a three-hour podcast popular in Silicon Valley, gets only a few thousand YouTube views, but most watch via clips on X. OpenAI recently acquired the show, which generated millions through flashy ads. As part of the deal, TBPN will “wind down” advertising, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Clippers add nothing of substance: no analysis, no response, not even filters or music. It’s the most boring content, spliced purely for the algorithm. Paid clippers are often very young editors. The only edit might be a solid border with clickbait text: “Joe Rogan talking about AI sounding too real 😨” one Instagram video reads. Another account, dormant since 2017 when it shared calligraphy videos, now shares Call of Duty clips tagged as sponsored. The original clip that made Clavicular viral was nothing special,just a short video with the Kick logo. The caption, filled with meaningless jargon, was the growth hack: “Clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame mogged by him👀😂”

Now that clipping has hit mainstream consciousness, it’s touted as the future of building platforms. Clipping is undeniably effective at generating views, but whether it builds meaningful audiences is unproven. The Rogan-Knoxville clip generated 272,000 views but almost no engagement: 700 likes, 14 comments, 10 reposts. Did Perplexity’s campaign affect its business or Rogan’s viewership? Did it change anyone’s mind about AI? Or was it just connective tissue between scrolls, forgotten as quickly as it appeared?

Eventually, the full-length content becomes a means to an end

TikTok’s pandemic-era rise made shortform video everyone’s problem or solution. In less than a decade, we’re in a second pivot to video that now stretches beyond news organizations. Podcasts have become video talk shows hosted by journalists, influencers, comedians, and nuns. Political strategy firms flood platforms with clips of politicians saying something shocking, knowing the clip itself is the news. Even I, a features writer, participate in the clip-ification of digital life: I make shortform videos explaining my stories to TikTok audiences who mostly won’t read the original. Some of it is out of necessity,promotion is the devil’s bargain. But overindexing on clipped versions means eventually, the full-length content becomes a means to an end. If clips are the present and future of media, what justifies making the unclipped original?

Now that the clipping cat is out of the bag, companies offering the service will likely be busy. Maybe some firm will hire a “Chief Clipping Officer” (though I’d advise against it). It might pump views for a while, but platforms are cracking down. Meta has said it’s targeting “unoriginal” content that includes clipper hallmarks: “adding borders, inserting captions, and changing the reel’s speed.” Clipping companies are pulling in millions by condensing politicians, podcasters, and technocrats into bite-sized content. But even clippers need something to clip from. If all that matters is going viral, the value of producing anything more complete diminishes, and so does the viewers’ incentive to engage beyond the clips.

In April, a clip of Tucker Carlson’s podcast circulated, in which he said he would be “tormented” for helping elect Donald Trump. The excerpt was shared by TMZ, discussed on The View, and clipped by Headquarters, a social media account run by former Kamala Harris staffers. What didn’t hit the clip farms was Carlson saying Barack Obama “hated” white people, or brushing off Trump’s racism. Carlson’s repentance is a perfectly executed soundbite, just the right size to satiate a viewer who can then scroll away. The clip becomes more urgent than the thing it existed to promote.