Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
You know those short viral clips you see of influencers on TikTok and Instagram? Well, there is an army and an industry behind them because companies are now hiring clippers to flood TikTok and Instagram with short promotional videos that game the algorithm. I'm joined by Elaine Burke, host of For Tech's Sake podcast for more on all of this. Hello, Elaine. Hi, how are you doing?
This is messing with my brain. I thought that the influencers and the podcast makers clipped their own stuff, but there's other people doing it.
Chapter 2: What are short-form video clippers and why are they trending?
So how is it all working?
The fact that there's a mix of things happening here kind of helps for this industry to operate in the shadows. And it works well when it operates in the shadows because we don't ever want to feel like we're being manipulated when we're scrolling through our feeds and things like that. And if there's a signal that that's happening, we will be turned off.
So the idea of clipping is that it's meant to look as organic as possible. So there's agencies and there's some brands will do it directly themselves that they will set up, say, a private discussion forum on something like Discord.
Chapter 3: How do companies utilize clippers to game social media algorithms?
And they will post to that and say, I want you to share clips of this film, this song, this TV show that's due to come out or this performance that happened at Coachella or something like that. Talk about what you loved about it. And if you can get a thousand views, you'll get a dollar and you'll get a dollar for every accruing extra thousand views that you can get over that.
So you do have to have a very popular clip to actually get paid for this. But people see it as, say, maybe an easy side hustle to get involved in. And the idea is that it's meant to be, as I said, ordinary users that have real accounts that are posting as a normal person online. But they get involved in this as a side hustle.
But some people, because they see an opportunity for money to be made online, start creating fake accounts and post to a thousand accounts as one person, all of them made to look like a real person sharing this band that I just discovered that I really like. Or it can even be less obvious than that with the likes of TikTok and Instagram. You can plug a song into a clip really easily.
So you can kind of, you know, soundtrack your clips by choosing the song. So it's just telling people like next time you do your holiday montage, make sure you put this song in it. And it just means that we as scrolling people are exposed to that content. And, you know, marketing is all about exposure to something.
And it's, you know, it's insidious and subtle and it's less obvious than advertising.
If I decide I want to be a clipper, I've got to be able to sort of suss out what's going to work and I've got to hit the jackpot by finding something that is just of the moment. It's in the zeitgeist and I put it out there and I keep sending it out and I keep finding clips that are similar to that clip and I am a winner.
Yeah. And the thing is, it's become easier to game that because a lot of our feeds now, it used to be that your social media feed was filled with things that you decided that you wanted to follow appearing in a chronological order. So you were getting your taste recommendations from friends, from people you knew or from people that you wanted to follow and admired or whatever.
But these days, increasingly, all the most popular platforms default to a algorithmically curated feed. So you haven't decided that.
what shows up in your feed it's not chronological and it's often not specifically the group of people you followed it's what an algorithm has decided like you may also like and that means that if a campaign is orchestrated to say can we get all of these people to post clips about this thing even if a few of them aren't making money off of it they are still feeding the beast in this essentially they're creating content around something that signals to the algorithm that
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Chapter 4: What strategies do clippers use to create organic-looking content?
a lot of people are making content about this particular film or this particular band. They must be something that people want to talk about and that's interesting because the algorithm isn't a curator, it's a piece of code and it's just responding to signals about what's out there and what's published.
And it can also lead to exposure to things that people were never aware of in kind of a suspicious way. So in 2022, Andrew Tate was the most Googled person in the world. And The reason for that is that a lot of people were suddenly exposed to this Manosphere character having never interacted with the Manosphere ever before.
And his Hustlers University, which is his kind of online get rich quick type of training program, actually encouraged people who signed up to it. to share clips of Andrew Tay. And if they could convert anybody who'd seen those clips to become subscribers, they would get a commission.
So he was an early adopter of this idea of creating an army of clippers to basically ramp up your exposure and your name being out in the world, outside of the circles that you normally are in.
So when it comes to the economy of this, who are the people who are making money from this?
So there's the Clippers themselves. Some of them are making substantial numbers, but the majority of people, this is kind of like when you hear that people make millions off of YouTube. That's a tiny, tiny percentage of the people who post to YouTube. So the majority of them would be probably making a few quid if they're lucky.
But as I said, they probably just see it as an easy side hustle to try and make a few quid. But then there's actually agencies that have been set up to be the in-between for this thing. So there is an agency called Chaotic Good who have spoken quite openly about this. And this is what is exposed to a lot of people that this stuff is going on.
There's also digital marketing agencies that do other types of marketing, but engage in these kind of services. There's one in Brooklyn called 100 Days. There's also it's defunct now, but there was a company called Floodify and literally its service was that they set up fake accounts to share things on a marketing team's behalf. So there's agencies inserting themselves into this.
And what's interesting is Chaotic Good used to have listed on its website campaigns that it had worked with, people it had worked with, and also a reporter had infiltrated one of their private chat groups to find what things they were asking people to post about.
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