It’s hard to imagine that MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber, needs help getting and keeping fans.

But behind the scenes, Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, employs the equivalent of a vast call center — more than a thousand “clippers” who put short versions of his stunt and challenge videos in front of online audiences and steer them to his YouTube channel, which boasts 448 million subscribers.

For a recent campaign, Donaldson’s team paid independent editors employed by a startup, called Clipping, $50 for every 100,000 views that snippets of his YouTube shows got on social media apps, according to a post on Discord, the chat app where the company does business. These contractors identify a viral moment, embellish it with a funny slogan and feed it onto services like TikTok and Instagram.

“People used to buy commercials on TV, billboards, radio time slots,” said Anthony Fujiwara, the 23-year-old founder of Clipping, a marketing service that he named after this new social-media-marketing technique. “Clipping is that for the modern era. It’s buying space and time on people’s phones while they scroll.”

The emergence of clipping shows just how much social media has changed since the early days as a platform for user-generated content. Videos that once seemed unusual or spontaneous and became instant topics of chitchat have given way to orchestrated marketing efforts. These advertising videos pop up in your social media feed and look like they could be from any random superfan.

In one YouTube Shorts clip, posted by an account called Reelz_official, MrBeast prompts comedian Andrew Desbordes, or Druski, to dunk a basketball. Under the clip, a character from Amazon.com Inc.’s King of Meat video game, one of Donaldson’s sponsors, jumps over obstacles. It’s a requirement detailed in the Clipping campaign instructions on Discord. The text reads: “No way MrBeast got Druski dunking on an 11.5m hoop ????????.”

Fujiwara declined to comment on his business with MrBeast, which has launched its own clipping operation, called Vyro.

Clipping doles out $300 to $1,500 for every 1 million views a clip gets across all of the apps, according to data on Discord. On top of that, clients pay the company a subscription fee of $2,500 to $10,000 a month, and sometimes more, according to Fujiwara. Behind the company sits a stable of 23,300 clippers – contract editors who create short-form versions of celebrities’ longer content on YouTube, Instagram and Twitch.

One clipper, Faisal Ali, who is 23 and based in Pakistan, said he earned $600 making clips for Donaldson. He even hired two sub-contractors, who edited videos and received a percentage of his payout.

The key to having clips find their way into consumers’ data feeds is to identify a “hook” for the first one to two seconds of video.

“Think of it like fishing,” he said.

Fujiwara started editing YouTube videos in 2018, when he was a 16-year-old attending high school in Los Angeles. His parents, who emigrated to the U.S. from Japan and Costa Rica, pushed him to make money from a young age.

YouTubers whose clips Fujiwara edited went from zero followers to 100,000 in a month, he recalled. Celebrity gamers took note, and soon Fujiwara was receiving inquiries from popular Fortnite players. Not a gamer himself, he applied what he knew about popular soccer videos to clips of video gamers killing their opponents.

Fujiwara noticed that social-media users didn’t only care if their gaming influencer won a Fortnite match. They were more interested in what the celebrities had to say and wanted something fun to look at. Fujiwara began posting clips of insults internet stars hurled at each other, trash-talking online haters or their hot takes about pop culture.

During the pandemic, Fujiwara began studying strategies for going viral, popularized by self-described “misogynist” influencer Andrew Tate and his controversial Hustlers University school for teaching money-making skills. In a conversation with gamer-influencer Adin Ross, Fujiwara recalled discussing Tate’s strategies and the potential for short-form video marketing.

So far this year, Clipping has generated about $7.7 million in sales, much of it in crypto. Clients including the managers of YouTube personalities, record labels and podcasters are allocating growing pots of money – in some cases more than $10,000 a month – for contracted clippers.

United Talent Agency, based in Beverly Hills, works with Clipping to boost clients’ social-media profiles and funnel potential fans from short-form video apps onto YouTube, Spotify or Twitch, where there’s more money to make. One recent campaign for Ross reaped 430 million views across 11,000 videos, created by 520 clippers, according to the company’s social media account.

Ross’ representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Clipping is “a way to promote your artists through an organic UGC (user-generated content) format,” said Dante Smith, senior vice president at Capitol Music Group and head of Motown Digital.

Smith came across Clipping in March through word of mouth. When he wants one of his artists’ songs to go viral, he and a team of digital marketers study what subculture to target, such as fashion, sports, reality television. Then they suggest clippers pair the song with the video genre.

For “Bodies,” the lead single on Offset’s album Kiari, they chose wrestling and anime clips, according to Smith.

Everyone from internet celebrities like Ross and Jake Paul to hip-hop artists Ice Spice and Offset have benefited from Clipping’s services, according to the company’s social media.

“My main goal is that, if you want to go viral, you have to go through me,” Fujiwara said.

Fujiwara still edits videos, including for top YouTuber Darren Jason Watkins, known as IShowSpeed. For others, though, he outsources clipping to his contractors. This year, he incorporated the company.

“If we wanted to pay taxes and be legal, or for someone to come in and invest, we’d need proper books,” Fujiwara said.

So far, he’s batted off interest from people who want partial ownership of his company. “I took a bunch of meetings with management companies based in LA, heard their advice and then just did it all myself,” he said.

Smith, the Capitol Records executive, said that in 2026 he’ll try and run clipping campaigns for back-catalog music, as well as new singles. He credits Fujiwara with building “infrastructure for how things are moving in the digital space today, with the fluidity to adapt.”

D’Anastasio writes for Bloomberg.