A 22-Year-Old Londoner Earns £120,000 a Year Clipping Videos

Eknoor Singh earns more than £120,000 a year — roughly £10,000 a month — turning other people's long videos into short viral clips, using nothing but his phone and a decent internet connection.

The 22-year-old Londoner is a professional "clipper". Clients — clothing brands, record labels, movie studios, podcasters, influencers — pay him to cut 30-to-60-second vertical videos from longer content and post them on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. "The more views a clip gets, the more money I make," he says.

The economics scale fast. Clippers can earn up to $3 (£2.30) per 1,000 views across platforms, so a clip that truly takes off can pay like a salary. Singh says he got hooked last year when he made $300 from a single short video of popstar Dua Lipa posted 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," he says. In May he clipped Sabrina Carpenter's reaction to having the tails of her dress stepped on at the Met Gala in New York — a clip that fits his criteria of funny, quick and engaging. He did not reveal the client behind it.

Who actually makes money at this?

Not many, according to the people who watch the industry. Social media consultant Lia Haberman cautions that high earners are rare. "It mirrors the creator economy more broadly. The vast majority make little to nothing," she says.

Streaming industry analyst Devin Nash warns that the workload is easy to underestimate. Successful clippers must "watch hours and hours of content, and they just live in that world," he says.

Ethan Weems, a 24-year-old from Wichita, Kansas, represents the more typical case. He makes "at least $1,000 a month" clipping for YouTuber and podcaster Caleb Hammer, host of Financial Audit, as a side hustle alongside other video work. "I don't want that typical nine-to-five job where I have to go into an office every day," he says — a trade-off that buys him time with his wife and one-year-old son, though at a tenth of Singh's income.

Takeaway: six-figure clipping incomes exist, but they are the outlier, not the business model.

Why are brands hiring teenagers?

Clippers — typically aged 16 to 25 — are assumed to understand better than any agency what resonates with their own demographic. Intermediary sites such as Clipping Culture, Vyro, Whop and Kick, plus forums like Reddit and Discord, connect them with clients. The dedicated sites charge companies a fee for access; Clipping Culture lists Capital Records, Universal Music Group and HBO Max among its clients.

For those firms, paying a young person working from a bedroom is far cheaper than traditional social media advertising — and likely more effective at winning attention.

The evidence, at least anecdotally, is Boxabl. The Las Vegas modular-homes firm has embraced clips featuring founder Galiano Tiramani. "I think we've done probably a billion views [of clips] so far," he says.

Do clips actually drive audiences to the full content?

Jimmy McLoughlin, a former Downing Street adviser who now hosts the Jimmy's Jobs of the Future podcast, treats clips as marketing funnels. "The clips are almost like trailers for the main events," he says.

The numbers back him up on his own output: a recent podcast with Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham "had close to 50,000 long plays, but in terms of clips, it's done millions."

Clipping Culture itself is run by someone the age of its workforce. Founder Evan Stanfield, 21, dropped out of the University of Kansas and set up the business last year. The site now connects brands to more than 340,000 clippers worldwide. "People's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter," he says of short video's rise, adding that clipping is a young person's game because "they're most of the consumers of short-form videos."

Takeaway: 340,000 clippers chasing the work means supply dwarfs the number earning Singh-level money.

For his part, Singh says he is "kind of clipping non-stop", wherever he happens to be. "I could be anywhere. I could go on holiday and make money," he says. That freedom is real for him — but with the vast majority of clippers earning little to nothing, per Haberman, the odds of replicating it remain the caveat attached to every success story.