It wasn’t quite The Social Network, but Evan Stanfield knew he had to leave the University of Kansas when his income exceeded a few hundred thousand dollars.
Last year, the 20-year-old dropout founded a marketing agency, Clipping Culture. Despite sounding like a barbershop, the startup focuses on slicing and dicing videos into bite-sized social media clips. Stanfield doesn’t edit these himself; instead, he pays thousands of freelancers to make shortform videos and post them to their social media accounts.
“It’s the most organic way to blow up on social media right now,” he says, redefining the word organic. Thanks to the rise of algorithmic feeds, clipping has morphed into the creator economy’s version of wheatpasting. One talent manager equated it to dishing out free samples at an ice cream store, with the hopes of convincing TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts users to try creators’ longer videos.
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