Our social media feeds are being inundated by clips. Big names like Justin Bieber, reality shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, and even AI companies like Perplexity — they’re all using bite-sized video segments to advertise themselves on social media. And they’re not just posting from their own accounts; they’re paying thousands of anonymous people to do it for them. 

This practice, a marketing tactic known as clipping, is everywhere — and still spreading. The Verge’s Mia Sato recently wrote a piece breaking down how the practice works and how it might be an existential threat to more nuanced, full-length content. 

Sato spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why everything is a clip now, the companies behind it, and what comes next.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How would you describe what’s happening on our Instagram feeds? 

It’s basically the TL;DR-ification of the entire internet. It truncates everything we make and it all goes down to “We need a way for people to discover our content.” And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is. 

Think about the politics videos. You see Trump giving a speech that Aaron Rupar is posting. Or sports highlights from the game the night before. You see this with sort of every podcast becoming a video. A major reason that happened was because they needed something to put on TikTok, to put on Reels, to put on YouTube Shorts.

What made you want to write about this now? 

The reason I felt like we needed to have a conversation about it is because of Clavicular. 

Clavicular is really a great example where the point of his online existence is clips rather than the full live streams. They know him through these disembodied short videos of this other thing that exists, but nobody is seeing. And you have this person who comes from obscurity into getting a 60 Minutes interview. 

I wanted to take this one example to illustrate a larger point about the nature of content on the internet and how people are working to go viral.

Is there a difference between the podcast clips that we talked about at the top of the show and what Clavicular is doing?

Clavicular is basically the industrialized version of a podcast that is just posting its own clips organically. The difference is that there’s an ecosystem under it that is paid. 

For the month between March and April, I believe there were something like 1,600 clippers working on his behalf, generating tens of thousands of videos, billions of views, and all of that is paid. People are paid to post this content and paid based on how many views the clips get. And so it is completely a scale game. It’s a hundred percent trying to take advantage of the algorithms of social platforms. These pseudo-anonymous accounts are profiting based on how much these clips are showing up on all of our feeds.

How much money is there to be made here?

[Clavicular] oversees 62,000 clippers on his platform. Some people are making tens of thousands of dollars a month. He claims the average is around $3,000 a month. It’s not nothing. Is it enough to support a family? Can you support a family on clips? Maybe not. But brands are paying companies like this clipping platform; [they] basically say, here’s $10,000, make us go viral.

What kinds of companies are paying for this service?

I was kind of surprised by how many household names were using this type of service. RuPaul’s Drag Race. There were clip campaigns for AI companies like Perplexity. Dan Bongino, former second in command at the FBI, who has now gone back to being a full-time podcaster. I found clipping campaigns that appeared to be for Call of Duty, the video game. Political candidates, which really gets weird. So it really spans different industries. There’s definitely a variety.

When I’m scrolling through, say, Twitter, I know when something being put in front of me is an ad because it’ll say ad, but I don’t know when I’m seeing something organically or when I’m seeing something that’s been paid to be elevated into my feed. And I imagine it’s the same on Instagram or TikTok? That you’re seeing things that have been sort of pushed upon you alongside things that maybe have organically entered into your feed? 

Yeah, and I think one of the things that clippers do is they make content that looks like it could blend in with organic content.

One rule of thumb that I like to share is, you can probably picture it now, you’re scrolling and you see a clip of the Joe Rogan podcast. The background is black, and on the black background there will be a caption that’s like, “I can’t believe bro said that. Shocked emoji.” You know what I mean?

I’ve seen that before. And then watch the video. And then nothing shocking is said, and I’m just like, “I hate the internet.”

There’s a really good chance that you were seeing paid clips. One of the campaigns that I found was promoting Perplexity via Joe Rogan’s podcast because Perplexity is a sponsor of the podcast. And so these clippers were hired to pump out a bunch of clips of Joe Rogan talking about Perplexity, and it would be hard, unless you checked the hashtags, to see that it was a paid piece of content. Buried in the hashtags, it says ‘Powered by Perplexity’, ‘hashtag sponsored’. 

Even that is a better example of a disclosure. A lot of this content has zero disclosure whatsoever. You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not, including, like I mentioned, I had found some political candidates hiring clippers. There was a candidate in Florida, a GOP congressional candidate who was running a clipping campaign with zero disclosure, which is, from my understanding, against the law. 

It is really the Wild West because a lot of these companies are not disclosing that they’re paying these accounts.

Can I read you the most depressing pair of sentences in your piece that you wrote? That I sent to many people to be like, how depressing is this?

Yes, please.

“But overindexing on the clipped version means eventually, the full-length content is a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped, complete content in the first place.”

That is really sad. 

Whoever wrote that.

That’s crazy.

It is so brutal because some of these things that are being clipped are, like, artful. 

Yeah. I will say, I wrote those really depressing sentences because I feel this. 

I’m a features writer. I write long things that are thousands of words long and are often behind a paywall. I make clips of my stories. I do the short-form video thing. I talk in front of my phone and explain my stories to audiences, and I know that very, very few people who watch that video will actually go and seek out my story and read it.

I wonder if you think — from having written this piece on “The Clippening,” as you call it — if this is just our moment or if this is our forever,

For me, it’s really hard to see an exit from vertical video because it is so dominant right now. At the same time, I don’t think anyone should completely put their trust into the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm because you don’t want to put your trust into a tech platform that can change things on a dime and you will have no control over it. 

I think the balance is, if you’re someone who wants new people to find out about your show or your story or whatever, you maybe need to be on short-form video. But how do you make it so the sad sentences that I wrote in my story do not become the reality, where the clips are the justification rather than creating the longer version, the real art or the real journalism or whatever? How do you avoid that as much as possible?

Last fall, Graham Platner — an oysterman running for the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Maine — landed in hot water, when some of his old Reddit posts, showing him blaming victims of sexual assault and calling himself a communist, surfaced. Then, there was a story about the Nazi imagery tattooed on his chest. He had the tattoo covered up. Platner emerged from those scandals relatively unscathed by admitting to his checkered past and saying that he had changed. 

In late May, however, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife informed his campaign that he had sexted women outside of their marriage on an app called Kik. And last week, the New York Times published reports of “unsettling” behavior by Platner from former girlfriends.

Nonetheless, on Tuesday, Platner won the Democratic Senate primary to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the November general election. (By Tuesday, Platner was running largely unopposed; his only serious opponent, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her campaign in late April.) 

As deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, a local newspaper based in Camden, Maine, Alex Seitz-Wald has been tracking Platner’s rapid political ascent — and how Mainers of all stripes, the people Platner will have to win over to defeat Collins, feel about him. Seitz-Wald told Today, Explained co-host Noel King that many people are torn over the scandal, but not so torn that they’re not still voting for Platner. He breaks down the results of the primary, Platner’s chances this fall, and more. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What do Maine voters think about Graham Platner? You live there; you talk to people. What’s the read? 

I’ve been talking to Platner voters since he jumped in as this totally unknown oyster farmer in August, who no one had heard of, running against a two-term sitting governor. And he instantly connected with people and developed this strong bond; people really related to him.

I think that helped him survive that first round of scandals in the fall with his tattoo and the Reddit controversies. Then, with this latest round, these later ones definitely hit differently. They didn’t roll off his back the way the earlier ones did. There was a lot of concern; there was a lot of disappointment. But ultimately, Maine Democrats have been trying to get rid of Susan Collins and failing for so long, and they have tried running more traditional candidates and lost. And so, I think they are willing to take a chance on him. 

It seems like a very pragmatic calculation that a lot of Maine Democrats are making right now, which is, “We need to beat Susan Collins. The stakes are too high. Supreme Court, control of the Senate, everything else, and we’ll put aside any concerns we have with his personal life if he’s our only chance to beat Collins.”

You will know that outside of Maine, there is so much speculation about who Graham Platner really is. Are people in Maine speculating about who Graham Platner really is?

Yes, and no. I think there’s been a major disconnect between what I’ve seen and heard on the ground — when I drive my daughter to school every day, I pass dozens of Platner yard signs that have been out every day for months — and between what the national narrative is, which is typically much more negative. 

I think there are very legitimate questions about his past that a lot of Maine Democrats have been asking. But he is also just a type of guy that is very familiar in Maine, and I think a lot of people felt like they could connect with him, could relate with him, even if they didn’t know exactly who he is. I think he also did a really effective job of weaponizing this chip on its shoulder that Maine has about how it’s viewed by the rest of the world. 

There’s this concept of: You’re either a Mainer, or you’re from away, and he is coded as extremely Maine. He was able to use that to say all these attacks from the New York Times or whatever, outside world, don’t listen to them. That’s people from away trying to tell us in Maine what to do. And that’s hitting deep in the core of the Maine psyche.

It is notable that Platner’s scandals have unfolded over a long period of time. The allegations in late May — again, I’m in DC, not in Maine, and that felt huge to me. Are you seeing any shakiness after the most recent round?

There’s definitely a lot of shakiness and a lot of concern, a lot of disappointment. 

One voter told me they were heartbroken about it, because they really thought that he was different, that he was not a typical politician and especially the way he responded to that first round of scandals with the Reddit post and the tattoo. He really took ownership. And it was part of this whole redemption arc that he had built about how he was a combat veteran with PTSD and in a really dark place. And then, he came home to Maine, got involved with his community and his business, met his now-wife, and was a different man. But the latest round of scandals kind of punctured that narrative, because he only got married in 2023, and those [sexts] were from just a couple of years ago. He wasn’t a young man in his early 20s. And so, I did hear a lot of disappointment about that and also a lot of cynicism from people who thought he was different relegating him back to, “Oh, he’s just a politician like the rest of them.”

But ultimately, partisanship is a very powerful force, and the stakes being what they are in a race that could tip control of the Senate, most Democrats are going to put aside their concerns. But — and this is a big “but” — the thing to watch, I think, heading into November, Susan Collins has a proven, almost unique ability in this day and age, to win split-ticket voters, to get people to vote for Joe Biden at the top of the ticket and, then, vote for her. So it would only take a relatively small number of defections to potentially tip things back into Collins’ column, especially if there are more revelations yet to come.

Do you think he can win against Collins?

I do think he can win against Susan Collins.

Just to level set for a second, I think any Democrat would have a tough time beating Susan Collins. A lot of people look at Maine — it’s New England, it’s a blue state. We haven’t voted for a Republican president since 1988, so they assume this is low-hanging fruit. It’s really not. Susan Collins is a very effective politician. So I think this race, no matter who the Democrat was, was always going to be a tight, within the margin of error race. 

That said, Platner has been able to raise the money. He’s been able to hold the coalition together. So far, despite all these scandals, he hasn’t really had any defections from elected officials. He’s done this enormous number of town halls. This is a small state where retail politics goes a long way and connecting with voters face-to-face can really make a difference. And that’s not something that Susan Collins does. 

In 2020, Democrats ran a squeaky-clean, well-qualified candidate who raised twice as much money as Susan Collins and still lost by nine percentage points. So I think there’s a willingness — almost a sense of necessity — among some Maine Democrats that we have to try something different, and there’s a good chance we’re going to lose anyway, so let’s take a flyer on this guy and maybe he can do it.