This L.A. startup churns out viral clips for social media

It’s hard to imagine that MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber, needs help getting and keeping fans.

- By Crciiia D’ANASTASIO

CLIPPING is “buying space and time on people’s phones while they scroll,” says founder Anthony Fujiwara.

(LEAFY YUN YE Bloomberg)

But behind the scenes, Jimmy Donaldson, aka. MrBeast, employs the equivalent of a vast call center — more than a thousand “clippers” who put short versions of his stunt and challenge videos in front of online audiences and steer them to his YouTube channel, which boasts 448 million subscribers.

For a recent campaign, Donaldson's team paid independent editors employed byastartup, called Clipping, $50 for every 100,000 views that snippets ofhis YouTube shows got on social media apps, according to a post on Discord, the chat app where the company does business. These contractors identify a viral moment, embellish it with a funny slogan and feed it onto services like TikTok and Instagram.

“People used to buy commercials on TV, billboards, radio time slots,” said Anthony Fujiwara, the 23-year-old founder of Clipping, a marketing service that he named after this new social media marketing technique. “Clipping is that for the modern era. It’s buying space and time on people’s phones while they scroll.”

The emergence of clipping shows just how much social media has changed since the early daysasa platform foruser-generated content.

Videos that once seemed unusual or spontaneous and became instant topics of chitchat have given way to orchestrated marketing efforts. These advertising videos pop up inyour social media feed and look like they could be from any random superfan,

In one YouTube Shorts clip, posted by an account called Reelz official, Mr-Beast prompts comedian Andrew Desbordes, or Druski, todunka basketball. Under the clip, a character from Amazon's “King of Meat” video game, one of Donaldson’s sponsors, jumps over obstacles. It’s a requirement detailed in the Clipping campaign instructions on Discord.