The Garden Harvest: The Clipping Conversation

Your weekly digest on the intersection of the Creator Economy and Legacy Media.

FRESH CLIPPINGS (Pun Not Intended)

Everybody Is Doing It Now

Clipping isn’t a new conversation, but recently it’s been in the limelight thanks to several factors. You may have seen or heard about certain stories, like the one of N3on spending over $1 million in just a month on an army of clippers to flood your feed and, similarly, Clavicular building an entire clipping machine to manufacture viral fame.

Creators have been doing this for a while, and as Jim Louderback says, “When it’s not just the cool kids doing dope stuff, it’s dead.”

Well, that’s exactly what’s happening right now. The “uncool kids” (a.k.a. traditional companies) have joined in,

Netflix is redesigning its mobile app to introduce Clips, a vertical video feed built for discovery, i.e. sharing highlights from original Netflix programming. And it’s not just Netflix. Peacock, Disney, and pretty much everyone else are doing more or less the same thing.

It makes sense, too. As Josh D’Amaro put it, he wants to make sure their “IP shows up in relevant ways across social platforms.”

But… is gaining fame and/or relevance among younger audiences as easy as clipping existing content and pushing it out?

The Short Answer is No

It turns out that it’s more complicated than that.

Lazy clipping your long form content can’t be treated as a side project. It might generate awareness but it won’t necessarily lead to audiences migrating to long form viewing, forming community, and all the other good stuff everyone’s chasing. An exercise might help here: how many creators do you know from clips that show up on your feed but you’ve never seen their actual videos? For me, it’s a lot…

A clip needs to stand on its own.

And if you’re a legacy studio or streamer building out a vertical feed, why not experiment with new content on your own short-form platform? Why depend on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok when you can test new stories inside your own ecosystem and develop the ones that resonate into something bigger?

Or, like Disney, bring in creators to make interesting videos with their own POV about your existing IP? David Freeman had a great post on this very point.

For those of us in legacy media, short form storytelling can sometimes feel alien. But if we only treat it as an awareness builder rather than a storytelling format in its own right, audiences will feel the difference.

And even for creators, lazy clipping just got a lot harder. Instagram's Adam Mosseri announced the platform will be deprioritizing unoriginal content, which is a politely worded hit on the repost-without-transformation economy. A welcome move for original creators on the surface, though let's be honest: Instagram wants you paying them to boost content rather than external clipping armies.

Which Brings Us To Patreon

The company recently announced a meaningful shift in how its discovery algorithm works , and the logic behind it is worth paying attention to beyond the platform itself.

Rather than optimizing for watch time and passive consumption, Patreon is moving toward signals that reflect genuine connection: shared interests, engagement quality, and creator collaboration. Their new Quips feature introduces network-enabled discovery, letting readers find new creators through the communities already forming around the ones they follow.

The more interesting question it raises is about platform incentives, though. Most platforms (let’s be honest, it’s all of them) optimize for their own growth first, which usually means algorithmic choices that extract attention rather than build relationships. I wrote about this a while back.

But Patreon is doing the opposite. And perhaps it’s too idealistic of me, but isn’t optimizing for creator success actually the same thing as optimizing for platform health?

Whether Patreon can pull it off at scale remains to be seen. But I do wonder whether platforms in general (and here, I mean both creator economy and legacy platforms) will shift their philosophy to treat creators as true partners rather than content suppliers; and if this will produce better outcomes for everyone in the ecosystem.

Time will tell.

GARDEN VIEW

https://vimeo.com/event/5860307

It turns out that you can’t embed Vimeo videos on Substack, so you’ll have to click through on this one. Oh well..

Anyways, this Milken Institute panel titled The Next Act: Creativity, Disruption, and the Future of Entertainment is worth your time. Some of the sharpest names in the business talking through where the industry is actually heading.

HARVEST QUOTE

“I knew that at the end of the day, the one thing that really sets you apart is quality and storytelling, so from the offset I could have been cheap and used iPhones to shoot my shows, but I knew that using cinema quality cameras would make a difference when you’re watching things on a phone.”

— Kareem Rahma, the creator behind popular shows like Subway Takes and Keep the Meter Running speaking on The Town podcast.

It's refreshing to hear a creator talk this way. Rahma built two of the more distinctive shows in the creator space by starting with a genuine concept and committing to executing it at the highest level, rather than chasing the algorithm and hoping something stuck.

The irony is that the thing most people treat as a shortcut, i.e. lower production quality, cheaper tools, and faster output, is often what keeps a good idea from becoming a great one.

Cinema cameras on a subway platform sounds like a small detail, but it's actually a philosophy on quality that can massively pay off.

Have a great weekend…

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