Meet the 22-year-old earning six figures by turning viral clips into cash
A new breed of social media worker is building six-figure incomes with nothing more than a smartphone and wifi. London’s Eknoor Singh, 22, is one of them — a full-time “clipper” who cuts longer videos into short clips for social platforms, pulling in upwards of £120,000 a year doing it.
Brands, record labels, film studios, podcast hosts and influencers hire clippers like Singh to comb through a full-length video and cut it into 30 to 60-second segments for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Because clippers tend to be young themselves — usually between 16 and 25 — clients bet that they instinctively know what will resonate with that audience. Pay is performance-based: clippers can earn up to $3 (£2.30) for every 1,000 views, so a single viral hit can be extremely profitable.
Singh traces his interest back to a $300 payday last year after he posted a short clip of singer Dua Lipa on Instagram. “I was like, ‘OK, this is a lot of money for simply posting a video.’ I instantly knew how lucrative it could be,” he says. He now claims to bank “at least £10,000 a month”, hunting for material that is funny, fast-paced and instantly engaging — like footage he cut last May of Sabrina Carpenter reacting after someone stepped on her dress at New York’s Met Gala. He declined to name the client behind that particular clip. As he puts it: “The more views a clip gets, the more money I make.”
Across the Atlantic, 24-year-old Ethan Weems treats clipping as a lucrative sideline to his other video work from his home in Wichita, Kansas, pulling in “at least $1,000 a month” cutting clips for Caleb Hammer, the YouTuber and podcaster behind the personal-finance show Financial Audit. The arrangement lets him work from home, freeing up more time for his one-year-old son and his wife. “I don’t want that typical nine-to-five job where I have to go into an office every day,” he says.
Not everyone strikes gold
Industry watchers urge caution, though. Social media consultant Lia Haberman notes that clipping mirrors the wider creator economy, where a few breakout earners mask many more making almost nothing. Streaming analyst Devin Nash adds that the grind behind a profitable clipping career is easy to underestimate — it demands watching endless hours of source footage, essentially living inside that content.
Websites now match clippers with paying clients, from forums like Reddit and Discord to marketplaces including Clipping Culture, Vyro, Whop and Kick, which take a cut from companies posting jobs. Clipping Culture alone lists major clients such as Capital Records and Universal Music Group, alongside HBO Max — for them, paying a teenager or 20-something working from a bedroom is far cheaper, and often more effective, than buying traditional social ads.
Las Vegas-based founder Galiano Tiramani puts the reach of his modular home firm Boxabl bluntly: “I think we’ve done probably a billion views [of clips] so far.” In Britain, podcaster Jimmy McLoughlin, a former Downing Street adviser who now hosts Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future, says clips act as “trailers for the main events” — a recent episode featuring Prime Minister Andy Burnham drew close to 50,000 full listens but millions of views once clipped.
Evan Stanfield, who dropped out of the University of Kansas last year at 21 to launch Clipping Culture, says his platform now links brands with more than 340,000 clippers worldwide, driven by the fact that “people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter” — and that the work suits the young because they are also the biggest consumers of short-form video. Back in London, Singh says he is “kind of clipping non-stop” wherever he happens to be: “I could be anywhere. I could go on holiday and make money.”
Source: BBC News