That band you like? You don’t actually like them. Your supposed enjoyment of their music is the product of a propaganda campaign engineered by the fat cats at Big Music.
That streamer whose clips you find funny? The streamer paid to promote that clip, so any amusement it elicits is illegitimate.
That interesting podcast clip? Your interest isn’t real interest; you’re just a mindless sheep at the whims of the algorithm puppeteers.
At least that’s what certain members of the media class would have you believe, as a meme develops that much of the internet is fake, real popularity is manufactured and amplified by algorithms and legitimized by a clueless mainstream media.
“Shady marketing and propaganda aren’t new, of course, but what is new is that the entire infrastructure of public conversation has been quietly captured by both,” Lane Brown writes in the piece. “On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas.”
And this contention is bullshit.
Brown’s argument centers on the practice of clipping — you know, those short, inescapable snippets of podcast video, often overlaid with subtitles, that inundate our social feeds. Social media creators or the marketing team working on their behalf can hire legions of freelance clips to cut up their content and flood people’s feeds with the clips. The practice has become so ubiquitous that no viral trend is organic anymore. They are all at least a little amplified by paid distribution.
Sure, fine. That’s just marketing. But the piece goes on to argue that clip distribution has given journalists the faulty impression that certain lowbrow podcasters, namely avowed anti-semite Nick Fuentes and looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular, are far more popular than they really are and thus unworthy of press coverage. Both have been the subject of countless thinkpieces in major magazines, which solidifies their position as public figures, even though their supposed popularity wasn't real to begin with.
Joseph Bernstein, The New York Times reporter who profiled Clavicular for the newspaper, justifiably pushed back on the New York magazine's argument that paper of record had somehow been duped into covering the influencer.
Bernstein is right — these influencers are, as the name implies, hugely influential, even if the clips of their livestreams are far more popular than the livestreams themselves. That’s because clips have become a media channel unto themselves, with its own endemic audiences and unique, incremental monetization opportunities.
“Clips,” Chad Mumm, president of golf media company Pro Shop Holdings, says, “are everything.”
Mumm had a brush with viral podcast clip fame recently when he interviewed legendary sports broadcaster Jim Nantz on golf podcast The Vanity Index. Nantz shared on the podcast the heartfelt story behind his trademark “Hello, friends” greeting when calling a game, and clips of that segment have generated 2.2 million impressions and 170,000 engagements across the shows Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts accounts — and this was all organic.
Many fans of a podcast interact with the show exclusively through clips, Mumm says. “If you engage with a clip on Reels, you’ll see that show every time you open Instagram. You don’t even have to listen or watch the show to be a part of it.”
That dedicated clip audience has become an incremental revenue stream for Pro Shop. When Pro Shop makes an ad deal, he upsells brands on extending the reach of their campaigns by sponsoring clips of its podcast — such as Dan On Golf, which has 23,000 YouTube subscribers, but whose clips attract nearly 3.5 million views a week. “Clips started off as marketing for the shows, but now they’re monetizable,” Mumm says. Most online videos has a single hero sponsor. With clips, the monetization opportunities increase by magnitudes.
Men’s interest site BroBible earns incremental revenue from clips through Meta’s bonus program, which rewards accounts for viral short-form videos — such as the site’s recent interview with Bar Rescue host Jon Taffer, whose explanation about why Gen Z doesn’t go out to bars was viewed nearly 500,000 times on Facebook.
BroBible publisher Brandon Wenerd is so focused on clipping the site’s big celebrity gets that he uses an AI program, OpusClip, that identifies and pulls 20 to 30 different clippable segments from an hour of video. “Clips are an editorial product like any other,” Wenerd tells The Rebooting. “It’s incremental revenue that I hope someday gets bigger.”
Wherever there is money to be made in media, though, there are certain to be bad actors. In the world of clips, they are viral clip accounts that rip popular videos without permission, or spam and bot accounts that can be activated to generate fake engagement.
James Del, former head of ad sales at Gawker, who now helps individual creators monetize their Substacks and podcasts, says the shady world of clipping reminds him of the traffic arbitrage tactics publishers would engage in to hit their reach numbers on display ads. And clip accounts not disclosing when their being paid to promote enters into ethically and legally dubious territory.
“Nobody is disclosing the financial terms of these clip deals,” Del says. “You can't pay for play. There's a long history of agency guidance, lawsuits, and even federal law in this space, it ultimately devalues the editorial integrity of the work. That matters to the journalists I work with but doesn't mean shit to the influencers who didn't spend 20 years trying to do legal, morally sound internet promotion.”
For Mitchell Jackson, PR representative for podcast clips machines such as Adam Friedland, Candace Owens and Rebooting curiosity Clavicular, clips have eclipsed press releases as a means to garner press coverage.
“A clip account is, to me, no different than a tabloid,” he says. Everyday, he sends clips from his clients’ podcasts to US Weekly, Page Six and Daily Mail.
Criticisms of the clipping economy are overblown, Jackson says.
“People think they can just clip their way to success, and that’s just false. If people aren’t interested in a person’s content, they’re not going to be interested in the clips,” Jackson says. “A lot of guys on Kik clip their podcasts and don’t have an audience because they don’t have Clavicular’s talent.”
The popular rock band Geese was recently criticized in a Wired article for paying a social media marketing firm to generate clips of the band and its music and have them shared on TikTok and Instagram Reels. The band, critics said, was an “industry plant,” whose success was entirely manufactured. But then the story elicited a backlash from fans of the band, myself included, who defended the band on the grounds they have good songs. People might have discovered Geese because of a social media marketing campaign, but that doesn’t their music isn’t good.
Mumm has a popular stand-up comedian friend (he declined to name names), who, of course, co-hosts a podcast that is frequently farmed for clips by clip accounts. The comedian briefly considered having his lawyer serve the clip accounts with takedown requests, but realized the clips were free marketing and driving ticket sales to his live shows. Now the podcast sends high-definition, ready-made clips directly to the clip accounts.
The engagement is real, even if the creators did put a little effort into making it happen.