I earn £120,000 a year making social media videos go viral

Eknoor Singh says he only needs his mobile phone and a decent internet connection to earn more than £120,000 a year.

The 22-year-old Londoner is a professional "clipper". He is paid by clients to make short, vertical videos for social media, in the hope of them going viral.

"The more views a clip gets, the more money I make," he says.

The way it typically works is that the client - who could be anyone from a clothing brand to a record label, movie studio, podcaster or influencer - has a longer video that the clipper watches first.

He or she then makes 30 to 60-second clips of what they consider to be the best bit or bits, and uploads them to Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or other platforms.

The idea is that the clippers, who are typically aged from 16 to 25, will have a better understanding of what will connect with that demographic, and get the short videos as many views as possible.

With clippers able to earn up to $3 (£2.30) per 1,000 views across platforms, it can be very lucrative if a particular clip does take off.

Singh says he got hooked on clipping last year when he made $300 from posting a short video of popstar Dua Lipa on Instagram.

"I was like, 'OK, this is a lot of money for simply posting a video.' I instantly knew how lucrative it could be."

Now he says he is earning "at least £10,000 a month".

He adds that he looks for clips that are funny, quick to watch and engaging, such as a short video he made in May of Sabrina Carpenter's reaction to having the tails of her dress stepped on at the Met Gala in New York. Singh did not reveal who the client was.

For 24-year-old clipper Ethan Weems from Wichita, Kansas, it's a lucrative side hustle to his other video-making work. He says he makes "at least $1,000 a month" from clipping.

He does this by making short videos for YouTuber and podcaster Caleb Hammer, who is best known for hosting a show called Financial Audit, which analyses the personal finances of his guests.

Weems says clipping helps him make a living from home – giving him more time to spend with his wife and one-year-old son. "I don't want that typical nine-to-five job where I have to go into an office every day," he says.

Yet while some clippers can make good money, social media consultant Lia Haberman cautions that there are very few of them. "It mirrors the creator economy more broadly. The vast majority make little to nothing," she says.

Meanwhile, streaming industry analyst Devin Nash says it's easy to underestimate the time required to make clipping a success. He warns that successful clippers must "watch hours and hours of content, and they just live in that world".

Connecting clippers with their prospective clients are a number of intermediary websites, where available video jobs are listed.

These range from pages on general online forums such as Reddit and Discord, to dedicated clipping sites such as Clipping Culture, Vyro, Whop and Kick.

The latter websites take a fee from the companies wanting the work done. Clipping Culture lists clients including Capital Records, Universal Music Group and HBO Max.

For firms such as these, hiring a teenager or 20-something working from his or her bedroom is far cheaper than paying for traditional adverts on social media, and likely to be more effective in terms of getting eyeballs.

That's the experience of Boxabl, a Las Vegas-based firm that makes modular homes. "I think we've done probably a billion views [of clips] so far," says founder Galiano Tiramani, who features in many of the company's videos.

In the UK, Jimmy McLoughlin, a former Downing Street adviser and now host of the Jimmy's Jobs of the Future podcast, has also embraced clips.

"The clips are almost like trailers for the main events," he says. For instance, a recent podcast with Prime Minister Andy Burnham "had close to 50,000 long plays, but in terms of clips, it's done millions".

Evan Stanfield, the founder and boss of Clipping Culture, is himself just 21. He set up the business last year after dropping out of the University of Kansas.

Stanfield says that the website connects brands to more than 340,000 clippers from all over the world. He has a simple theory for the popularity of short videos: "People's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter."

He adds that making the clips is a young person's game because "they're most of the consumers of short-form videos".

Back in London, Eknoor Singh says he is "kind of clipping non-stop", wherever he is.