Clipping campaigns: marketing’s next move in a fragmented attention economy

In early May 2026, New York Magazine and The Verge published articles outing the secret sauce of marketing in the social video era: clipping campaigns. 

In summary, thousands of accounts across social media are mobilised – through formal companies like Floodify or through informal networks on Discord channels – to post short video clips of whatever is being promoted.

Accounts posting clips en masse, combined with narrative cues in the captions and additional campaigns focused on comments sections, create a flywheel effect that tricks algorithms into reading the campaign as a ‘viral moment’. Reporters may pick up on this as a trend and report it as legitimate, adding further scaffolding. The result is a mix of decentralised, promotional efforts, and organic traction, with unreliable success metrics but very affordable rates: many campaigns cost as little as $1 CPM. 

Floodify founder Joe Lim estimates 90% of the content you see online is a result of campaigns like this. 

To clip or not to clip

While the phenomenon of clipping may itself come as little surprise, the scale and prevalence of it is likely challenging for any marketer who has not yet adopted the strategy. Even major artists and household names rely on this artificial inflation to crack into the mainstream. 

Clipping has become the next move in marketing. It thrives because cut-through is hard in a fragmented attention economy, and algorithms are fickle. Formal paid promotions are high-cost, and even sponsorships can reduce trust in the creators sharing beauty products or gaming discount codes. 

Clipping is low-cost, hard to trace – many posters don’t disclose that they’re posting ads – and at least partially made up of organic traction, as initially ‘seeded’ posts get picked up by the algorithm and put in front of users who want to be part of what they perceive as a cultural moment. The goal is not to create a trend completely from scratch, but to accelerate early engagement enough to push something into the algorithm’s favour and keep it there for longer. As such, there does have to be something real and compelling to tap into, but social prevalence is often no longer the result of product alone. 

Is social media just an ad market now?

All this leaves some big questions. If even the likes of Justin Bieber are using clipping for their sets to go viral, how are smaller creators to fare against them? Must everyone turn to clipping now? 

As The Verge’s article is careful to point out, running a clipping campaign amounts to gambling at scale for hits. It works, but is not as effective percentage-wise as tapping into a dedicated network. In other words, virality doesn’t always sell tickets. Fandom does. 

As awareness of clipping grows, however, it is likely that more creators, artists, and businesses will take advantage of it. More accounts will be created for the purpose, and more audiences will be aware it is happening and will therefore become less receptive. The scene will grow even more cluttered and harder to crack through than it is already. Social platforms will have to step in to keep the “social” USP alive, and government regulations will likely grow stricter on enforcing use of sponsorship and promotional labelling. 

For social platforms, this will come on top of the same challenges brought about by AI. It threatens to reduce the feed into a torrent of artificial promotion, with none of the authenticity or agency left that originally drew users in. 

Scale generates awareness, but scarcity creates value. As major creators follow one route, the smarter move for smaller creators is to go the other way, offering audiences what clipping can’t manufacture: authenticity and trust.