For years, Emrah Bayraktar did just about anything he could to make money: Cleaned cars. Worked a night-shift in a warehouse. Made sandwiches at a Subway during the day.

When he wasn't eking out a living with part-time work, 25-year-old Bayraktar from Antwerp, Belgium would take out his iPhone and edit long interviews of influencers into snippets and post them to Instagram.

"And then one random night, I saw a notification saying that I earned $12, I was like OK cool," Bayraktar said. "Then two weeks later, I made two-and-a-half thousand dollars, and I thought, 'Maybe I could just quit my jobs and go all-in on this.'"

And he did, earning a cut every time someone bought something from a link he placed in the video clip.

He became so skilled at editing the short videos that he now runs a network of 40,000 freelance clippers and has a YouTube channel where he teaches people how to become clippers, directing them to websites where, instead of getting paid for so-called affiliate link purchases, clippers are paid per view they generate.

Bayraktar's career is a microcosm of how an entire new shadow economy is operating online. Thousands of clippers are inundating social media platforms with bite-sized clips of podcast interviews, sports games, films and other long-form content.

Whether you're scrolling TikTok, Instagram, X, or YouTube, it's hard to avoid the snappy videos being churned out by this army of clippers trying to exploit algorithms with a provocative moment, engaging music and maybe the right news cycle, that will send footage viral. Clippers often upload dozens of the same clips to multiple platforms hoping one of them hits the virality jackpot.

A new breed of online marketplaces like Content Rewards and Vyro are fueling demand for clips, offering a space where marketing agencies can advertise clip-for-cash campaigns.

Some recent examples include an agency offering $1 per 1,000 views of clips of Major League Baseball games and an artificial intelligence startup offering $25 for every 1,000 views of clips about its product. Polymarket, the prediction market site, was offering 50 cents per thousand views, with a total budget of $70,000 for clippers to fight over.

Is social media 'getting gamed by these clippers, or are they enabling it?'

Anthony Fujiwara, the co-founder of the agency Clipping, said as long as phones and social media dictate modern life, so will clips.

"Clipping makes it so you have a higher chance to be featured on these phones, instead of someone driving past your content on a billboard, it's now someone swiping past it as they scroll," he said, adding that the industry will evolve with social networks. "If algorithms pivot, the clippers pivot."

Roy Lee, who co-founded the artificial intelligence startup Cluely, wrote on X last year that he hired more than 700 clippers, which has led to tens of millions of views for its products. He said the company sends direct messages to accounts that are making clips, and "9/10 times" he gets a response. "The people running these accounts are hungry Slovakian teenagers."

Surveys on the demographic profile of clippers are hard to come by, but Bayraktar said among his thousands of contract clippers, the average age is between 16 and 24 years old.

"In a clipper's mind, there's always micro things you can do to make something go viral," said 19-year-old Bo Lucenko, who lives in the Chicago suburbs and is a college freshman studying marketing. He said he makes around $4,000 a month clipping for influencers and tech founders. "There's a lot of money in the clipping game right now," he said.

Marketing experts say while more and more cash is flowing into the clip-ification of all things, those watching the content can view clips as cheap and disposable moments, not something that hooks someone on a show or internet personality. On top of that, those making money on clips tend to be the middlemen clippers, rather than the original creators.

"Arbitrage players are taking this ability to re-package content as clips, and it's not satisfying the consumer, doesn't deliver good value to the advertiser and strips the originator of the content the ability to monetize it," said Lou Paskalis, who runs the marketing consulting firm AJL Advisory. "It's a perfectly terrible problem."

Social media platforms are on the other side of the clipping rat race. They are both encouraging clips by giving them algorithmic juice but also cracking down on pages dedicated to clips, where countless duplicates of the same moment are spread — activity that can appear spammy or bot-like.

"I don't envy the social platforms here," Paskalis said "Are they getting gamed by these clippers, or are they enabling it?" he said. "Or are they enabling it so they don't become a victim of it?"

Clips as the product, not the promotion

While short-form video is nothing new, having dominated the web since the rise of TikTok during the pandemic, the clip becoming its own type of marketable content has been accelerating in recent months.

Analyst Ed Elson published a Substack piece last month called "The Clip Economy," arguing that the measure of success is no longer how many people watched or streamed any given episode of a show, but how many people consumed the clips.

A number of prominent influencers, like looksmaxxing live streamer Clavicular, left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and white supremecist Nick Fuentes have clip views that far eclipse their live-streaming audience. For instance, Piker's average livestream racks up about 33,000 views, but his average clip is viewed more than 700,000 times.

"They are essentially taking over the entire media ecosystem," Elson said of clips.

Elson co-hosts the podcast Prof G Markets with New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway and has seen the impact of clipping first-hand.

"Something changed for me when a few people in a row came up to me on the street and said, 'Hey you're Ed Elson, you're the Prof G Markets guy,' and I said, 'oh yeah, do you listen to the podcast?' And they said, 'No I don't listen to the podcast, but I love your clips.'"

He added: "That's when I realized that's where people are consuming all of my content in this one strange medium that I use to write-off as practically my advertising tool," Elson said. "Suddenly I realized, clips aren't the promotional material for the content, clips are the content."