The comedian's version of selling out used to be a sitcom pilot. The rock star's version was a jingle.

Hollywood's version, apparently, is downloading TikTok and pretending it invented the vertical scroll.

Last week HBO Max quietly turned itself into a content farm.

Let’s talk about the industry it just admitted it needs: clipping.

Who's actually running it (a 23 year old, a MrBeast side project, and a commerce app you've probably never heard of by name). Who's doing the labor. Where it lives. What could blow the whole thing up.

And what it costs, which is the only reason any of this exists in the first place.

It’s an interesting, strange, and sometimes dark world.

Also in this edition:

🧠 Clipping: Risky and Worth It (Thoughts Are My Own)

💰 Whatnot Talks Its Way To A $20B Valuation

🤖 Hank Green Admits His AI Habit Isn't Healthy

🎮 A New Studio Bets Creators Are Hollywood's Next Talent Pipeline

🖼️ YouTube Finally Gives Shorts Real Thumbnails

💼 Jobs from Dr. Squatch, MrBeast, and 5x Media

🎭 ...and a meme from yours truly!

Let's get into it.

TLDR:

Last week HBO Max quietly turned on a swipeable, vertical feed inside the Max app called HBO Max Shorts. It started rolling out to select US iOS users on July 30th.

If you've opened TikTok anytime in the last five years, you already know what it looks like. Bite-sized clips and cliffhangers that end with a tap-through to the full episode. HBO built an in-house machine learning tool to scan its entire library and flag the moments most likely to stop a thumb mid-scroll. Human editors sign off before anything goes live.

HBO spent two decades building a brand on "It's Not TV." Now they've admitted the format that actually works is the one built by a bored teenager with a phone and a MrBeast download.

HBO's own YouTube channel already pulls 120 million monthly views off clips and behind-the-scenes cuts. The clip isn't the trailer anymore. The clip is the product. The show is the upsell.

But somebody has to make the clips. Somebody has to decide which ten seconds carry the emotional payload and get them in front of the right eyeballs before the algorithm moves on. For the last three years, that job has been outsourced to a shadow workforce most of the industry still doesn't have a good name for.

HBO just proved the biggest media companies on earth think that skill (find the moment, cut it, ship it, repeat) is worth building in-house.

So let's actually talk about clipping. Who's running it. Who's doing the work. Where it lives. What can break it. What it costs.

Who's actually running this

Anthony Fujiwara is 23, known by Fuji by hit friends and haters alike. He industrialized this thing before most agencies knew it existed. His company, Clipping (also operating as Clipping Exe), pulled in roughly $7.7 million in revenue with about 23,300 contract editors, all coordinated through a Discord with around 60,000 members.

The mechanics are simple. Brands drop raw footage into a shared drive. Contractors cut it, post from their own fan accounts, get paid on verified views. Clients include Stake, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Capitol Music Group, Polymarket, and a stack of major recording artists. One Adin Ross campaign alone generated 430 million views off 11,000 videos. His top clippers have crossed $1 million in lifetime earnings.

The best of them pull $30K to $40K a month running multiple accounts at once.

MrBeast's answer is Vyro, which launched in October 2025 because Jimmy got tired of paying outside networks $50 per 100K views to clip his own content.

Vyro flips it into a self-serve marketplace. No follower minimum. Anyone posts a campaign, anyone clips it, payouts run automatically at a flat $3 CPM. That's well above YouTube's Partner Program ($0.50 to $2.00 CPM) or TikTok's Creator Fund (as low as $0.02 to $0.04 CPM). Mark Rober's on it too. Same mechanics as Fuji's operation. Just productized.

Whop built Content Rewards into its broader commerce platform, and it's probably already on your creators' phones. Brands set a budget and a rate. Creators grab a campaign, submit clips, get paid after a 30-day verification window at $0.50 to $3 per thousand views.

Over $1.7M paid out through Content Rewards specifically. 98,000+ registered clippers. 82 campaigns running at once. Whop's total platform revenue is the real headline though: $142M annualized run rate as of October, up from $56M at the end of 2024, a 255% jump. Content Rewards is a real chunk of that growth.

Where this lives, and where it's headed

Three places, and they're converging fast.

The open platforms: TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Kick, where clippers run fan and aggregator accounts. Discord, which is the actual back office of this entire industry (briefs, asset drops, leaderboards, payouts). And now, more and more, inside the platforms themselves.

HBO Max Shorts is a streamer deciding it doesn't want to depend on an outside clip economy to do this for them. Give it 18 months and this story flips from "how do we get people to clip our stuff" to "why are we paying anyone at all when we already own the footage and the distribution."

Fuji's model survives that shift, because he's selling access to an army of distribution accounts, not just editing labor. That's a moat. Pure clip-cutting isn't, and Vyro and Whop should be paying attention.

The exposure here is real too. Clipping campaigns almost never carry the paid-promotion disclosures the FTC technically requires (we’ve seen that go bad). Empyre is one of the only companies I’ve seen do it in a compliant way.

Stake ran what's been called the most aggressive clip-farming operation on record. At one point they had a coordinator posing as an anti-Stake account while secretly on Stake's payroll. It worked, right up until the UK Gambling Commission forced Stake out of the British market in February 2025 after the whole thing got exposed.

That's the downside case in one story. The exact thing that makes clipping cheap (decentralized, deniable, off the books) is also what makes it a regulatory landmine.

And the cost is the whole reason this exists. Fuji's network runs $300 to $1,500 per million views. Vyro's flat $3 CPM. Whop averages around $1 per thousand. Some fintech and crypto campaigns run as low as $0.20 per thousand. Traditional paid media, for comparison, runs about $25 CPM.

Do that math and clipping lands anywhere from 5x to well over 100x cheaper than a media buy for equivalent reach. And it shows up looking like organic word of mouth instead of an ad.

Clipping is an arbitrage on the gap between what platforms charge for attention and what a gig worker will take to post a video from an account with no name attached to it.

We talk about clipping way too much at Stealth Talent.

Because, you know, it works.

And we absolutely agree with all of the naysayers. They’re 100% correct.

“This stuff is on junk channels.”

“There’s no way to know the person clipping isn’t a Bulgarian pre-teen working for $.50 per hour.”

“If we disclose as a branded piece, it won’t perform and no one will clip it, but legally we’re supposed to do that.”

All great points.

And yet we do it. A lot.

This reminds me of reaction content from the early 2010’s. We were all arguing about whether it’s fair use. There were a few lawsuits. Mostly minor.

And do you know what happened to everyone who made reaction content and became rich and famous?

Nothing bad!

Phil DeFranco and Ray William Johnson and Sssniperwolf never had to go to court for this.

This is exactly how clipping will play out.

It’s insanely cheap media, it’s easy, and the barrier to entry is nearly non-existant.

Everyone running clipping companies is doing a very one-point-oh job of it. There’s very little innovation.

But a savvy entrepreneur who understands market differentiation and listens to their customers could break through the wlal and make billions.

Literally billions.

Remember: they’re going after the media market, not the influencer marketing market.

Everyone working in the creator economy should be pitching clipping for every campaign, and I’ve seen clipping attached to less than 5% of the work that passes by our desk.

Just do it. It will be fine.

The creators, brands, governments, and platforms are making waves this week in the name of fortune, fame, and fun.

💰 Whatnot is reportedly in talks to raise a new round at a $20 billion valuation, nearly double the $11.5B mark it hit at its October 2025 Series F. The livestream shopping app did $8B in live sales last year and its GMV surpassed $6B, more than double 2024's $3B. If this round closes, Whatnot becomes one of the most valuable companies to ever come out of the creator economy, and my home for buying retro video games.

🤖 Hank Green says his AI usage "is not healthy". Viewers caught an AI-sounding phrase in a Complexly video, he owned up to using ChatGPT for research, and then got real about it: the dopamine he gets from talking to LLMs "is not healthy for me or good for the world." He's cutting output and recommitting to writing his own words. Worth reading if any of your creators lean on AI for scripts.

🎮 Home Game Studios, a new production company from ex-Select Management exec Adam Wescott, just launched its first project: This Is A Game Show?, a Tubi original hosted by TikToker Mitsy Sanderson (5M+ followers). Tubi's been leaning into creator-led originals since Sidelined in 2024.

🖼️ YouTube finally shipped custom thumbnails for Shorts the week of July 24th, ending a two-year wait after telling creators in July 2024 the feature wasn't happening. Creators can upload their own image now, or pick from AI-suggested frames. Small feature, real business impact: how a Short looks on your channel page is a genuine factor in brand deal evaluations. A/B testing isn't included though, unlike long-form. Boooooo.

TikTok Creative Manager, Dr. Squatch

Dr. Squatch built its whole brand on being weird and funny on the internet, and now they need someone to own that specifically on TikTok. You'd run the creator ecosystem, brief the Live agency, and step on camera yourself when it's called for. Good move if you want single-channel ownership at a brand that already knows how to go viral on purpose instead of by accident.

Marketing Scientist Lead, Creator Monetization, Beast Industries (MrBeast)

This is the actual team building Vyro, the clipping marketplace we spent this whole issue talking about. They're hiring someone to figure out what a sponsored clip is really worth, with real incrementality testing instead of gut feel. If you want to be in the room where clipping's numbers get decided instead of reading about them in a newsletter, this is about as close to the center of it as a job posting gets.

Social Media Manager, 5x Media

This one's ours. You'd be working directly with me and a team of seasoned television executives building out 5x Media, not reporting up through five layers to get a post approved. If you want a seat that close to the room where the decisions get made, send your resume to [email protected].