Everything is clips now

0:01The first post when I opened Instagram was a Slate post. And it is a clip of the Slate podcast, What Next TBD. But the guest is my boss, Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge. The products themselves aren't any good. What's after it? The next post is from an account called Prof G Markets. I believe that's a marketing podcast. I've never listened to it. Just like, look at this. This is crazy. This is my normal feed. So there's Nilay. There's Taylor Lorenz clip. Here's, I don't know who that is. Here's another clip. Remember when Instagram was like pictures of our friends' sandwiches? That era is long gone.

0:39They killed it. And it's been replaced by clips of podcasts? Yeah. Clips of podcasts, clips of shows, clips of movies, clips of sports. Clips, clips, clips. We're going to talk to Mia about that more on Today Explained. From Vox. I'm supposed to say from Vox at the end.

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1:55Work your magic. Today explained. I'll turn you into a damn owl, homie. I'm Mia Sato. I'm a senior tech reporter at The Verge. How would you describe what you and I just scrolled through on Instagram? It's basically like the TLDRification of the entire internet because it kind of truncates everything we make. And it all goes down to, we need a way for people to discover our content. And right now, the way to get people to discover the content is to make clips of it, no matter what it is. Think about the politics videos you see, Trump giving a speech that Aaron Rupar is posting. Nothing bad can happen.

2:39It can only good happen. Or like sports highlights from the game the night before. You see this with sort of every podcast becoming a video. I said, Cooper, what cologne do you wear? When you say bitch. I don't think so, honey. People who skip the museum gift shop. Oh. The major reason that happened was because they needed something to put on TikTok, right? To put on reels, to put on YouTube shorts. Yeah. What made you want to write about this now? Because it doesn't feel necessarily new. The reason I felt like we needed to have a conversation about it is because of clavicular. Lavicular is a young man.

3:22He's in his 20s. He started posting on the internet as a teenager around when he was about 15 years old on these looks maxing forums, which are forums that are dedicated to making yourself as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible. Body modification. Oh no, that guy?

4:09short videos of this other thing that exists but nobody, relatively nobody is seeing.

4:17Is he dead? Hopefully. And what this is doing is this is creating micro fractures and according to Wolf's law, the bone is going to grow back stronger. You have this person who comes from obscurity into getting like a 60 minutes interview. I mean, that's quite literally the worst sequence of questions I think I've ever heard. I kind of, you know, wanted to take this one example to illustrate a larger point about the nature of content on the Internet and how people are working to go viral. Is there a difference between, like, I don't know, the podcast clips that we talked about at the top of the show and like what Clavicular is doing?

4:57Yes, absolutely.

5:02Clavicular is basically like the industrialized version of, you know, a podcast that is just posting its own clips organically. Because the difference is that there's an ecosystem under it that is paid. For like the month between March and April, I believe, there were like something like 1600 clippers working on his behalf. Oh my gosh. Generating tens of thousands of videos, billions of views. And all of that is paid. People are paid to post this content and paid based on how many views the clips get. And so it is completely like a scale game. It's 100 % like trying to take advantage of the algorithms of social platforms.

5:46And these sort of anonymous, pseudo-anonymous accounts are profiting based on, you know, how much these clips are showing up on all of our feeds. How much money is there to be made here? For my story, I spoke with one founder of a clipping farm. And he said, on average... A farm. And I'm very comfortable calling it a farm. He oversees like 62 ,000 clippers on his platform. Some people are making tens of thousands of dollars a month, he claims. The average, I think he said, was around$3 ,000 a month. So, I mean, it's not nothing. Is it enough to have a full supportive family? Can you support a family on clips?

6:37Maybe not, but brands are paying companies like this clipping platform to basically say, here's$10 ,000, make us go viral.

6:51What kinds of companies are paying for this service, or is it just all of them? I was kind of surprised by how many household names were using this type of service. RuPaul's Drag Race. Peppermint. You need one. There were clip campaigns for AI companies like Perplexity. Look how it generates it. I like that. Dan Bongino, former second-in-command at the FBI, who has now gone back to being a full-time podcaster. We can fight back or we can get dead. I found clipping campaigns that appeared to be for Call of Duty, the video game. Political candidates, which really gets weird. My new job for the next 18 months, and probably longer, is I have to be a social media influencer.

7:37So it really spans, you know, different industries. There's definitely a variety. I mean, we've been talking about the sort of mechanics of clipping, but then for the experience that we're having, I wonder, you know, when I'm scrolling through, say, Twitter, I know when something is being put in front of me that that's an ad because it'll say ad. But I don't know when I'm seeing something organically or when I'm seeing something that's been paid to be elevated into my feed. And I imagine it's the same on Instagram or TikTok that you're seeing things that have been sort of pushed upon you alongside things that maybe have organically entered into your feed.

8:24Yeah. And I think one of the things that clippers do is they make content that looks like it could blend in with organic content. So like one rule of thumb that I like to share is you can probably picture it now. You're scrolling and you see a clip of the Joe Rogan podcast. The background is black and on the black background, there will be a caption that's like, I can't believe bro said that. Shocked emoji. You know what I mean? I've seen that before and then watched the video and then nothing shocking is said. And I'm just like, I hate the internet. There's a really good chance that you were seeing paid clips.

9:02One of the campaigns that I found was promoting perplexity via Joe Rogan's podcast because perplexity is a sponsor of the podcast. And so these clippers were hired to pump out a bunch of clips of Joe Rogan talking about perplexity. And it would be hard unless you checked the hashtags to see that it was a paid piece of content. Because buried in the hashtags, it says, powered by perplexity, hashtag sponsored. And even that is like a better example of a disclosure. A lot of this content has zero disclosure whatsoever. You would have no way of knowing if the account was paid to post it or not, including, like I mentioned, I had found some political candidates hiring clippers.

9:48There was a candidate in Florida, a GOP congressional candidate who was running a clipping campaign with zero disclosure, which is, from my understanding, against the law. So, yeah, it is really the Wild West because a lot of these companies are not disclosing that they're paying these accounts. Can I read you the most depressing pair of sentences in your piece that you wrote that I sent to many people to be like, how depressing is this? Yes, please. But over-indexing on the clipped version means eventually the full-length content is a means to an end. If clips really are the present and future of media and reach online, one begins to wonder what justifies making the unclipped complete content in the first place.

10:39That is really sad. Yeah, whoever wrote that. That's crazy.

10:49It is so brutal because some of these things that are being clipped are like artful. Yeah. I will say, like, I wrote those really depressing sentences because I feel this. You know, like, I'm a features writer. I write long things that are thousands of words long and are often behind a paywall. I make clips of my stories. I do the short form video thing. I talk in front of my phone and explain my stories to audiences. And I know that very, very few people who watch that video will actually go and seek out my story and read it. I wonder if you think from having written this piece on the clippening, as you call it, if this is just our moment or if this is our forever.

11:39For me, it's really hard to see an exit from vertical video because it is so not just ascended, but like dominant right now. At the same time, I don't think anyone should completely put their trust into like the TikTok algorithm or the Instagram Reels algorithm because you don't want to put your trust into a tech platform that can change things on a dime and you will have no control over it.

12:08I think the balance is like if you're someone who wants new people to find out about your show or your story or whatever you maybe need to be on short form video but how do you make it so the thing that I the sad sentences that I wrote in my story do not become the reality where the clips are the justification rather than like creating the longer version the real art or the real journalism or whatever. How do you avoid that as much as possible?

12:42You can read Mia's full piece and all of its glory at TheVerge.com. When Today Explained is back, we're going to talk about some real art that may have made its way into your feed that you maybe thought was a psyop, an industry plant, and maybe it kind of was.

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17:00Today Explained. Have you heard of the band Geese? They've been around for a while, but they got really big last year. and people started to believe their big moment was a psyop, that people were constantly seeing clips of geese in their feeds because the band was an industry plant. It turns out there was something to that conspiracy theory. Spencer Kornhaber from The Atlantic is here to explain. So basically this marketing firm, Chaotic Good, they started talking in interviews about how good they were at their jobs. We are looking for underpriced, efficient places to put your songs where we think your audience will be.

17:38And their jobs, as they described it, was basically to create the impression that a band is more popular on social media than they maybe really are. We use the term trend simulation, which I think is useful. Who are important people in certain genres? What are the niches? Why did this happen? And so then we have a song that isn't naturally going viral. We apply that to it. And so we say we're kind of simulating a trend. And the methods for that include operating a bunch of quote-unquote ghost accounts that they can activate to show you happy fans raving about music or to post memes and have a certain artist's music in the background.

18:18They can swarm comment sections and sort of change the narrative about what people are saying about an album. This song saved my life. Best drummer of all time. These guys are so underrated. Screaming, crying, throwing up. They can make it seem like the internet is all raving about an SNL performance or a concert all at once. And the guys who founded this firm gave an interview to Billboard where they're talking about this really casually. Like, this is just like, you know, everyday business and they're pretty good at it. If you were building a new account, which we do many times a day, you would never post non-trending audios.

18:57It's worse practices, but artists have to. And so we view our job as kind of pushing against that and helping them. But to a lot of people in the music world, this was a really scary surprise. They didn't know this was happening or they didn't know it was happening to this extent. And then people went and looked at their client roster and they saw all of these names of famous and less famous artists on it. And Geese was one of those names. Let me dance away. Now, is that allowed? Is there anything untoward about that? Is there anything illegal about that? There are laws surrounding this sort of thing.

19:32They date back to the 1950s when there was the Paola scandal, as it's known, when record labels were caught bribing radio DJs to play music on the radio they wouldn't otherwise play. And so since then, my understanding is that it's basically illegal to have undisclosed sponsored content where you're paid to do something to endorse something without actually disclosing that. Now, there's a gray area. There's a lot of gray areas around this. If you are doing something on the internet as part of your job and you put a song in the background, it's not always clear that you're being directly paid to endorse that song.

20:15And so I think that's the sort of loophole that a lot of these firms live in, where it's not actually payola by the definition of the law. It's not payola because you're not explicitly saying, hi, I love geese so much, you should listen to geese. I think that's right. You know, and a lot of these platforms like TikTok and Facebook have bans on undisclosed endorsements as well, but they're kind of poorly enforced and it's sort of hard to tell what actually falls into them. Who else was doing this? Because it wasn't just geese. Who else was Chaotic Good claiming as, I don't know, one of their successes?

20:52All sorts of people. Justin Bieber. Dua Lipa. Somber. Alex Warren. Who had the biggest song in the world last year. But also really cool indie darlings. There's a singer, OK Lou, who makes really delicate, beautiful, intimate, weird electronic pop that I feel like just me and my friends are obsessed with. What do you think, oh baby, do you think we already know? It was very surprising to see that she was on this list too. Now, while you might think an up-and-coming, challenging, electronic, bedroom artist, whatever they might be, could benefit from this kind of marketing, why does someone like Justin Bieber, who just headlined Coachella, need a firm like Chaotic Good?

21:45We can only speculate, but if you think back to his Coachella performance that he just gave, what happened? He did a pretty, I would say, unusual performance. He was showing YouTube videos on stage and kind of walking around and not showing a lot of energy. Wi-Fi, man, come on. And immediately the internet starts to debate whether that was a flop or a really brave work of artistic genius. Justin Bieber pulled off a very straightforward, very enjoyable run of songs from the new album cycle Swag Swag 2. And I just find it bizarre that Justin Bieber is okay being remembered for this. I imagine that a firm like Chaotic Good gets into that debate, activates its accounts, posts the best clips of the performance with people screaming about how beautiful it was.

22:33they go into the comment sections, I imagine, and seed it with more of a positive reception. And, you know, these sort of narratives matter to an artist's career. It matters a lot whether in the eye of history and the public consciousness, Justin Bieber's thought of as has-been or someone who's actually in the prime of his career. And so I imagine that that's part of what's happening. You'd be hard-pressed to come up with a truly organic example of a musician blowing up just purely from the songs alone. Usually there's some dark arts of marketing involved in the rise of anyone from an indie band, Nirvana to Mariah Carey to Beyonce.

23:21They're all working with labels and distributors whose job is to make their music as popular as it can be. And people do that, have changed over the years, and we're in an era where all sorts of new methods are being used to accomplish that. But the fact that Geese was promoted, had industry connections, that there was a plan to make their music popular, shouldn't surprise anybody.

23:54So there's examples all throughout history of this happening, and there's also examples of there being backlash at certain points. You could go back to the 1800s at opera houses in France, where there was these troops of people called the Clac, who were paid to applaud during performances so that they would inspire audience members to be more engaged and to like the music more. Gustav Mahler, he banned the Clac, you know, because he wanted to bring the sense of authenticity and seriousness back to the art form.

24:31Tin Pan Alley, before even the advent of recording, really, before pop music was something that you listened to on a record, when it was just sheet music that you bought at a store, the way that Tin Pan Alley would market its songs was by paying people called pluggers, who were basically like street musicians or musicians who performed at public venues, they would pay them to play the songs of a particular publishing house, thereby hopefully causing people to want to go out and buy the sheet music for that music. You know, then I think about like the 70s where disco kind of is this insurgent musical movement coming from black and brown and queer people and urban centers and then becomes this sort of corny, commercialized pop spectacle that people got sick of by the end of the 70s.