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Clips have conquered the internet, as in short excerpts of longer videos. They're everywhere on social media, and behind the clips are many, many clippers who are paid by the view. NPR's Bobby Allyn spoke to one of them.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Emrah Bayraktar was scraping by in Belgium doing a little bit of everything - cleaning cars, working a night shift in a warehouse, making sandwiches at Subway during the day. When he wasn't working, 25-year-old Bayraktar would take out his iPhone and turn long interviews of influencers into snippets and post them to Instagram.
EMRAH BAYRAKTAR: And then one random night, I saw a notification saying that I earned $12, and I was like, OK, cool. This is OK. And then two weeks later, I made $2,500.
ALLYN: Bayraktar was getting paid when someone would buy something from a link he placed in a video clip. He got so good at it that he started doing it for other influencers and entrepreneurs. Eventually, he quit his job to be a full-time clipper.
BAYRAKTAR: I've saw a lot of clippers that quit after a week because they didn't get any views, but I've been at this game for more than three years.
ALLYN: Bayraktar now has a YouTube page where he teaches people how to make clipping into a side hustle or even a lucrative career - set to dramatic violins, of course.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "I BUILT 1M+ FOLLOWERS CLIPPING OTHER PEOPLE'S CONTENT")
BAYRAKTAR: I generated over 1.1 million followers, not just on one account, but across six different clipping pages. I grew all of them past 100K followers. Some even passed 200K followers. And I'm going to show you exactly how I did it.
ALLYN: It's not the first time somebody on YouTube has pitched a way for you to get rich quick, but thousands of people have followed his lead. And that's because there are now marketplaces where agencies upload videos and allow anyone to clip them for cash. Some recent bounties include an agency offering a dollar per thousand views of clips of Major League Baseball games and an artificial intelligence startup offering $25 every thousand views of clips about its product.
The founder of a clipping agency told me that clipping is the modern form of a TV ad - grab a slice of people's attention as they scroll. Bayraktar agrees with that. He says instead of going through Google or Meta to advertise, people are now just posting a flood of clips to social media. He says the pitch to brands usually goes something like this.
BAYRAKTAR: We can create a mass clipping campaign. We have a network of clippers. Let us post all of that content, and you don't post videos on Meta ads. You don't waste money on that.
ALLYN: Not everyone is buying into the clipping economy. Longtime advertising executive Lou Paskalis of AJL Advisory says clippers are creating a lose-lose-lose situation.
LOU PASKALIS: That doesn't really satisfy the consumer, doesn't really deliver good value to the advertiser, and strips the originator of the content an opportunity to monetize that content and pay the individual who created it. So it's a perfectly terrible problem.
ALLYN: Analyst Ed Elson recently published a Substack piece called "The Clip Economy," arguing that the measure of success is no longer how many people watch an episode of something but how many people saw the clips.
ED ELSON: They are essentially taking over the entire media ecosystem.
ALLYN: Elson is the co-host of the podcast "Prof G Markets" with New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway. Elson says clips are increasingly a path for people to jump-start their careers as influencers. He's learning that for himself in real time.
ELSON: Something changed for me when a few people in a row came up to me on the street. They said, hey, you're Ed Elson. You're the "Prof G Markets" guy. I said, oh, yeah, yeah. You listen to the podcast? They said, oh, no, I don't listen to the podcast, but I love your clips.
ALLYN: So his goal now? To make his podcast into even more clips.
Bobby Allyn, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLI XCX SONG, "360") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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