Inside The 'Clipping Farms' Driving Fintech's Marketing Boom
- GAB NEWS
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Scroll through TikTok, Instagram Reels, or X on any given evening and you’ll encounter a familiar pattern: a fifteen-second podcast clip where a founder drops a hot take, a streamer highlight reel with a logo tucked in the corner, a meme you’ve seen before but this time with a brand watermark stamped across the bottom. The content looks organic. It shows up alongside posts from your friends. The algorithm served it to you because people like you watched it.
But behind each of these clips sits a paid editor, sometimes one of hundreds working for a single company, posting the same content from dozens of accounts simultaneously.
This is "clipping," and it has become the preferred marketing channel for a growing number of fintech and crypto companies.
Brands hire independent freelancers, known as clippers, to extract short, engaging segments from longer content like podcasts, livestreams, or interviews, then post them across social media platforms. Clippers are paid based on performance, typically between $1 and $5 per thousand views. Some campaigns pay even less. Emily Lai, CMO at growth marketing firm Hype Partners, noted in a public breakdown of crypto clipping tactics that some campaigns run as low as $0.20 per thousand views.
The result is a decentralized distribution network that looks native to both users and algorithms. Cliptic.co, a clipping agency that has worked with various crypto casinos and influencers, shares examples of millions of views being generated via clipping campaigns.
Clipping is for the modern era
Anthony Fujiwara
"People used to buy commercials on TV, billboards, radio time slots," said Anthony Fujiwara, founder of a leading clipping agency that has generated nearly $8 million in revenue. "Clipping is that for the modern era. It's buying space and time on people's phones while they scroll."
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The practice emerged from fan culture (music listeners clipping concert footage, podcast fans sharing their favorite moments) but in the past two years it has professionalized rapidly. Marketplaces like Whop now list clipping gigs alongside other digital work. Agencies like Clipping Culture and Lumina Clippers manage campaigns for enterprise clients. And the economics are hard to argue with: a single $5,000 influencer post buys roughly the same reach as 500 individual clips, according to Web3 marketing consultant Stuart Hendricks. The difference: the clips look like user-generated content rather than advertisements.
"People have been trained to skip content that looks like ads," said Leon Abboud, founder and CEO of crypto marketing firm Unfungible. "A clip looks organic, so it performs like an organic content piece."
Traditional advertising CPM rates can’t compete with this
Aleksa Ibrahimovic - Cliptic.co
Recruitment is blunt. Roy Lee, the 21-year-old CEO of AI startup Cluely, described his approach in a public thread: scroll through Instagram and TikTok, find any account posting clips, and send a direct message offering a paid clipping opportunity. "It gets responded to 9/10 times," Lee wrote. "The people running these accounts are hungry Slovakian teenagers."
Lee has become the most visible evangelist for clipping as a startup growth strategy. Cluely, which makes an AI coaching overlay for meetings and sales calls, raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz and reached $7 million in annual recurring revenue, growth Lee attributes in part to a clipping operation of unusual scale.
"Cluely has hired over 700 clippers," Lee wrote on X. "Every single Cluely-related piece of content gets crossposted across thousands of accounts, generating tens of millions of extra views."
To feed this operation, Lee appears on at least two podcasts per week. Everyone at the company creates content. The 700-plus clippers then extract highlights, edit them into short-form videos, and post them from their own accounts across TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and X. The result, Lee claimed, was 100 million views in a matter of weeks.
His philosophy on measuring returns is deliberately loose. "Clipping is cheap and its value isn't in direct product ROI," Lee wrote. "It's in squeezing all virality out of potentially viral moments. Everyone has made a single post that flopped. Posting it 699 more times will make sure you get the virality it deserves."
Lee believes clipping's influence extends well beyond marketing. He has argued that short-form clips now shape public opinion more effectively than traditional media, comparing the cultural impact of a single viral clip to Anthropic's Super Bowl advertisement, which, he claimed, generated a fraction of the impressions.
Stake.com's $4.7 Billion Clip Machine
If Cluely represents the bull case for clipping, Stake.com represents what happens when the tactic is deployed without boundaries.
Emrah Bayraktar, who’s personally generated over 400 million views for brands including Andrew Tate, Iman Gadzhi, Luke Belmar, sees two distinct clipping strategies. 'Some brands need pure reach - get the logo in front of millions of eyeballs, build brand recognition. That's legitimate. But the brands getting the highest ROI treat clips like performance media - they test which content actually drives clicks, signups, or sales, then double down on what converts.'
The brands getting the highest ROI treat clips like performance media.
Emrah Bayraktar
Stake, a Curacao-licensed crypto casino that generated an estimated $4.7 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024, ran what journalists and researchers have called the most aggressive clip farming operation ever documented. Rather than clipping its own content, Stake paid aggregator accounts roughly $100 per post to watermark stolen viral memes (wedding videos, fight clips, historical photos, content entirely unrelated to gambling) with the Stake logo.
The operation ran through a three-tier system of intermediaries: a Discord server with direct contact to Stake's marketing team, the Whop marketplace listing campaigns at $40 to $400 per million views, and third-party communities like Clipify managing day-to-day coordination. Only accounts with 50 million or more monthly views could qualify, ensuring the network consisted exclusively of established engagement farmers.
Akhil Sarin, chief marketing officer at Easygo, Stake's parent company, described the underlying philosophy in an interview with NEXT.io: "It's not just about signing a single influencer. It's about saturation — creating an in-house team that maximises exposure."
One account in the network, @FearedBuck, originally a Milwaukee Bucks fan page, grew from 64,000 to over 645,000 followers after pivoting to Stake-watermarked content in August 2024. Owen Carry, who investigated the operation for Slate, described it as "an amorphous advertising campaign that ignores international borders and the gambling laws that exist within them."
The network unraveled in December 2024, when an X user called @BadTwtProfiles infiltrated a Discord server and exposed a coordinator named "harkits" as the administrator of multiple Stake-sponsored accounts, including one that posed as an anti-Stake parody page while secretly being on the company's payroll. The thread received over 145,000 likes. Elon Musk personally warned of "annihilation" for manipulative accounts, and by the end of December, the harkits network was suspended. On February 12, 2025, the UK Gambling Commission forced Stake to exit the British market entirely.
New accounts replaced the suspended ones within weeks.
Why Fintech and Crypto Are Ground Zero
Clipping has found traction across industries (entertainment, consumer apps, even politics) but fintech and crypto companies have adopted it with particular enthusiasm. The reasons are structural.
Major advertising platforms including Meta and Google restrict or outright ban ads for many financial products, cryptocurrency exchanges, and gambling services. Clipping sidesteps these restrictions entirely because the content never enters the ad system. It appears as user-generated posts from independent accounts, and platforms' algorithms treat it accordingly, boosting clips that generate engagement without flagging them as paid promotion.
"Clips organically perform on the timeline," said Abboud. "Platforms push content that keeps people watching. Clips are engineered to have higher retention, conversational pacing, and built-in pattern interrupts. The algo boosts them harder than static ads or UGC."
The audience demographics align as well. Fintech and crypto users skew young and spend hours on short-form video platforms, the exact environment where clipping thrives. And the economics suit industries with high customer acquisition costs: clipping at $1 to $5 per thousand views costs a fraction of traditional digital advertising.
Companies in "legal gray areas," such as investment apps, cryptocurrency firms, and AI companies, are "more likely to take on the potential risk of advertising through clips that potentially violate FTC guidelines," Digiday reported.
The Reckoning
Platforms and regulators are beginning to respond, though slowly.
Nikita Bier, X's head of product, publicly acknowledged the practice in a post flagging suspicious activity on the platform. "These are likely undisclosed paid posts (also known as 'clipping')," Bier wrote. "When you see this happen, the person or brand in the story is likely paying a 'clipping agency' to take over Timeline for a day. We're looking into it."
X's suspension of the Stake-linked accounts and the UK Gambling Commission's enforcement action represent the first significant consequences for clip farming. But the FTC, whose endorsement guidelines technically require disclosure of paid promotion, has not yet brought an enforcement action targeting the clipping model specifically. The tactic's decentralized nature (hundreds of independent accounts, each paid per view) makes it harder to police than a single influencer failing to tag a post as sponsored.
Platforms face their own dilemma. Clipped content drives the engagement metrics they're built around. Cracking down means removing content that users watch and share, even if the commercial motivation behind it is hidden.
The New Attention Economy
Clipping isn't going away. It's professionalizing. The CEO of digital marketplace Whop has compared it to ride-sharing: "I'm very bullish on clipping as income source. Like an Uber driver, would they prefer to be driving an Uber or would they prefer to be clipping? The only reason they wouldn't prefer clipping is they don't know it exists yet."
MrBeast's clipping platform Vyro paid out $100,000 to clippers in a recent campaign, according to Lee, most of it for brands unrelated to MrBeast himself. Agencies are expanding into dedicated crypto and e-commerce divisions. The infrastructure for a permanent clipping economy is being built in real time.
The question now isn't whether clipping works. From Cluely's rapid growth to Stake's 50-million-impression-per-day operation, that much is clear. The question is what kind of marketing channel it becomes. The same tactic that helped a 21-year-old build a $7 million business also plastered an offshore casino's logo across memes consumed by children. Platforms and regulators now have to catch up to a marketing model that was designed, from the start, to look like it doesn't exist.