They’re watching all of these guys. If you don’t get yourself out there on these social-media platforms, that’s who’s gonna fill the void. [Music]Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about clips.There’s a good chance, if you spend a decent amount of time online, that a lot of the media you’re consuming is coming in the form of short-form video clips. Instagram Reels, videos on X, TikToks, YouTube shorts, and whatever is happening on Facebook.

While writing this, I opened up my Instagram account, and here’s what I saw in order: a snippet of Kevin Hart talking about his tequila business on a popular tech podcast. A clip of pop singer Dua Lipa interviewing a playwright for her book-club podcast. A short video of my favorite band, Goose, shredding in St.

Augustine, Florida. And a quick CBS Sports clip of two PGA Tour golfers talking before a sudden-death playoff in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Only two of those posts come from posts I follow.

The rest were algorithmic recommendations.Once you start looking, you realize that short video clips—not tweets, or posts, or static photos—have become the atomic unit of online content. Short-form video, of course, isn’t new, but the prevalence of the clips is.Because clips are, in a way, distinct from short-form video. They’re supposed to be snippets of something bigger.

In theory, they’re supposed to be the trailer or the teaser: something that will catch attention and, theoretically, get people to consume the larger thing.Only, that may not be what is happening.Clips have become a business unto themselves. Livestreamers and new-media influencers including video podcasters have enlisted professional clippers to capture the best moments from their videos and seed them across social media. Record labels are doing this too, getting clippers to pair compelling video snippets with artists’ songs on places like TikTok, all in the hopes that the song is going to blow up.

Sometimes it works. But regardless, it’s clear: A lot of people are viewing, enjoying, or engaging with the clips, even if they never seek out the original work.But clipping is a volume game. On dedicated Discord servers, clippers are standing by for the opportunity to make hundreds of clips: all with different edits, all of them geared toward finding what sticks with the algorithm.Recently, Kick, the livestreaming platform, published clipping stats from the period of March 5 through April 5.

The numbers are staggering. In total, 1,737 clippers made more than 309,000 videos. Clavicular—the edgelord looksmaxxing livestreamer infamous for hitting himself in the face with a hammer—published more than 69,000 video clips from his livestream across social-media platforms in one month..

He racked up more than 2.2 billion views.And it’s not just the shock jocks. And this is leading to clipping becoming an economy unto itself. It’s changing not just what we see, but who we see.

It’s scrambling the very definition of what it means to be popular online, and it very well may change what creators and even media organizations end up making.To explain all of this, I’ve brought on Ed Elson. Ed is the co-host of the Prof G Markets podcast; the author of its tech, economics, and media newsletter; and I think, it’s fair to say, an extremely online person whose clips frequently show up in my feeds. Recently he wrote about this phenomenon, and he argues that clipping has taken over the internet, creating a situation where the teasers are more popular—and potentially more lucrative—than the original content itself.

He joins me now to explain why.[Music]Warzel: Ed, welcome to Galaxy Brain.Ed Elson: Thank you for having me. Good to be here.Warzel: So you host a popular podcast and, from my vantage, you are someone who’s in a lot of places at once, right? Frequent episodes, frequent posting on all the platforms. And you’re somebody who is making things, like I am, to be consumed by other p