Clippers and view botting: big social trends shaping the internet
In the last few months, there has been all sorts of coverage about the online streamer Clavicular. This post isn’t really about him, rather it is about the practice of clipping that has in part helped drive awareness of him into the mainstream.
To a greater or lesser extent, these articles all mention the trend that is driving so much noise around this person - and perhaps more importantly, the platform he uses.
In the New York Times piece, it explains how he streams each day for up to eight hours, with the goal of creating viral moments that can be clipped and distributed over social media. It says that:
Today, 10,000 people regularly watch Clavicular’s stream concurrently, some of whom are paid by Kick to clip short videos.
Meanwhile, the GQ piece is more detailed on role and financial incentives for clippers:
He explains the economy of Kick “clippers,” the anonymous users who spam bite-sized Clav clips on multiple platforms. Kick supposedly pays people to clip streamers’ content; Clavicular told me his clippers get $30 for every 1,000 views they rack up. His whopping 950 clippers, the most of any streamer, function as both workers who boost his content and parasites who flip his humiliations into personal profit.
In the story of clippers, we can see a mix of all sorts of factors that are shaping the internet:
The use of virality and flooding strategies to try to reach audiences and get them to engage with content, a product or service
New types of monetisation being developed for a wider range of users
These financial incentives can lead to all sorts of unappealing and undesirable behaviours which are hard for other users to spot and harder still for the platforms to mitigate against
Platforms are trying - with difficulty - to manage the beasts they’ve created, while also trying not to damage their traffic and income
New (often niche) competitors are using strategies like clipping to challenge the established platforms
The growth in paid clippers means the noise around viral trends can now no longer be trusted to equate to genuine popularity
Financial incentives on certain platforms are moving beyond just clipping and are being blended with gaming, gambling and crypto which could become more mainstream over the coming years.
This isn’t the only area where the blurring of lines between paid for activities and the use of fake traffic or fans to present the appearance of popularity has happened.
A semi-regular theme of this newsletter is to note how increasingly we are swimming (drowning?) in content - real and AI generated - and then pondering a) how sustainable these trends are and b) how as producers you can plan within this environment.
Dealing specifically with the practice of paid clippers, many are increasingly of the view that this practice in its current form is a house of cards - however whether it collapses, or just moves on to a new trend, is hard to predict.
