ANTWERP — Emrah Bayraktar, a 25-year-old from Antwerp, Belgium, left his night-shift warehouse job and a daytime position making sandwiches at a Subway after earning $2,500 editing short video clips of influencer interviews and posting them to Instagram. He now operates a network of 40,000 freelance video clippers and runs a YouTube channel that teaches viewers how to enter the business.

Before turning to clipping full time, Bayraktar also cleaned cars to make money. He began editing long influencer interviews into snippets for social media, uploading them in hopes of generating views.

"One random night, I saw a notification saying that I earned $12," 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.'"

His YouTube channel directs viewers to websites where clippers are paid based on the views their videos generate. The average age of the contract clippers in his network is between 16 and 24 years old.

Thousands of freelance clippers are posting bite-sized clips of long-form content on social media platforms, often uploading the same clip to multiple platforms in hopes that one will go viral. Online marketplaces such as Content Rewards and Vyro allow marketing agencies to advertise clip-for-cash campaigns. One marketing agency offered $1 for every 1,000 views of clips of Major League Baseball games, an artificial intelligence startup offered $25 per 1,000 views of clips about its product, and Polymarket offered $0.50 per 1,000 views with a total budget of $70,000 for freelance clippers.

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

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

Some influencers, including Clavicular, Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes, have clip view counts that far exceed their live-streaming audiences. Piker's average livestream draws about 33,000 views, while his average clip view count exceeds 700,000.