Should social media clippers disclose they’re being paid?

PLUS: Why VC firms are hiring social media influencers

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Should social media clippers disclose they’re being paid?

By now you’ve probably heard of the “clipping economy” — the army of social media agencies that are paid to chop up songs, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and other longform content and distribute them across short form video feeds. Vulture published a piece arguing that an increasingly large portion of our media consumption is derived from what is basically undisclosed marketing:

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. 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. We’ve locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato’s cave, where what looks like the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketers, political operatives, foreign-influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell.

So is the proliferation of these “sock puppet” accounts a bad thing? Yes and no.

I mean, yes, all marketing should be disclosed. People should be able to tell when content has been paid for; otherwise, the entire information ecosystem starts to break down. I don’t want to live in a world where I constantly have to wonder whether an article or video only exists because some interested party funded it.

That said, I think clipping has fewer harmful effects than most other forms of undisclosed paid promotion.

For one, these clips usually aren’t directly endorsing a product. They’re mostly repackaging existing content into a more digestible format. At most, the action they prompt is watching a longer version of the same content — whether that’s a TV show, movie, or podcast. I just don’t see much consumer harm in that.

Secondly, these clips are distributed through feeds that are overwhelmingly governed by algorithms, meaning I’m only seeing them because I’ve already signaled some level of interest. Many of the viral videos come from accounts with almost no followers, so there’s no trusted brand or personality explicitly endorsing the content. In most cases, the primary force amplifying the video is the platform itself — whether that’s TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube — which makes the consumption feel largely organic.

Really, the greatest harm I see here is that this type of marketing crowds out the work of indie creators who don’t necessarily have the budgets to hire clipping armies. For instance, I produce a longform video podcast, but I’ve never devoted any resources into chopping my episodes up into clips and distributing them. If I had done so, there’s a good chance my audience would be larger than it is today. In essence, these clips are diminishing the democratizing force of the internet, and that’s indisputably a bad thing.

ICYMI: From MrBeast to microdramas: Scott Brown’s bet on phone-native storytelling

The Second Rodeo founder explained how he went from producing a Larry King show to running The Rock’s YouTube channel to directing his own microdrama series.

That case study actually sits behind a paywall, but if you’re not ready to subscribe, I also included it in an ebook that you can download over here.

Good riddance to the search era of media

Puck published a piece looking at how publishers are slowly resigning themselves to a future where Google sends less and less traffic over time:

Publishers, most of which have already spent the better part of the past decade on the back foot, are pivoting once again. Jonah Peretti, who recently announced he was selling BuzzFeed to Byron Allen, has said that most of the growth from loyal readers now comes from user-generated games. The New York Times is growing, largely based on its bundled games and cooking extensions. At CNN, Mark Thompson’s response to the collapse of cable and the open web is a weather app. James Murdoch’s acquisition of Vox Media and New York magazine seems largely about the podcast network, and the potential for its affinity-driven model to slot into his growing thought-leader events portfolio. In a TBPN interview last week, Condé Nast C.E.O. Roger Lynch grabbed some easy headlines with his revelation that he’d recently told his underlings to act as if search were already fully dead …

The past 18 months have been particularly telling. By mid-2025, the number of queries that resulted in zero clicks had increased from 60 percent at the beginning of the year to nearly 70 percent, while the percentage of traffic referral to Google Gemini and A.I. Overviews exploded. Between April 2025 and April 2026, traffic to Gemini’s website grew by more than 570 percent, per SimilarWeb.

For the record, I’m not a believer in “Google Zero” — the term coined by Verge editor Nilay Patel predicting a future where Google sends zero traffic to websites. There will always be some percentage of searches where users actually want to click through and read the original source material. Not every search is question-based.

That said, I do think search will play a smaller role in how people consume media, and that’s probably a good thing. I’ve worked in newsrooms and seen firsthand how search traffic distorts editorial priorities. Outlets pour enormous resources into producing commoditized content that’s largely indistinguishable from what competitors are publishing. The goal becomes capturing drive-by traffic from readers who leave the moment they extract the information they came for. Those users aren’t loyal to the publisher — they’re loyal to Google.

I also think this kind of traffic encouraged publishers to create terrible user experiences. Because search visitors were unlikely to become long-term subscribers, publishers leaned heavily on open programmatic advertising. And the only way to generate meaningful revenue from open programmatic ads is to cram pages full of them. The result was increasingly unusable websites that steadily eroded brand equity.

The post-search era of media will be built around direct distribution, and there’s really no way to succeed at that without creating a differentiated product. Publishers will have to stop wasting resources on “what time is the Super Bowl?”-style content and spend more time uncovering new information. They’ll need to be original. They’ll need to be entertaining. They’ll need to do the kinds of work that attract people to media in the first place. Nobody grows up dreaming of becoming an aggregator, and the media ecosystem will be healthier once publishers no longer have to behave like one.

(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

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Quick hits

The Atlantic interviewed Sam Reich, the CEO of Dropout, about how he bought the company from IAC for $0 and then turned it into a profitable subscription streamer. [The Atlantic]

Net Influencer profiled a third-generation janitor who started uploading his cleaning videos and amassed 4 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. He makes over $300,000 a month selling a print guide to spring cleaning. [Net Influencer]

Since Elon took over Twitter, it’s seen a significant decrease in advertising revenue and currently has only 6 million paid subscribers — some paying as little as $3 per month. [New York]

The Guardian profiled Robby Hoffman, a rising comedic star who had her breakout role in the HBO show Hacks. [The Guardian]

Audible launched a pop-up retail outlet where people can go to sample audiobooks — trying to recreate the atmosphere of a traditional bookstore. My guess is this is more of a gimmicky marketing stunt than an actual business venture. [NYT] (BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

Romantasy is now the fastest-growing genre in book publishing, and while Hollywood is eager to capitalize on it through adaptations, there’s one major hurdle: fantasy shows are enormously expensive to produce at a time when nearly every streamer is trying to rein in production budgets. [Puck] (BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

A major VC firm hired an influencer with more than 200,000 Instagram followers to host its podcast — part of a growing trend of venture capital firms using content to improve deal flow. [Business Insider]

The NBA hired a basketball YouTuber with over 4 million subscribers to provide on-air commentary and other content for its official channels. [Digiday]