How to get clipping clients: finding creators who pay for clips

Anyone with more long video than time to cut it. The groups that buy most often:

• Podcasters with a weekly video episode. An hour of conversation holds a dozen moments that work alone, and short clips are how new listeners find a show.
• Streamers, whose best moments are buried in hours of footage they'll never go back through.
• Coaches, founders and course creators with webinars, live Q&As and talks.
• YouTubers with long videos and no Shorts, who know Shorts bring viewers but have no time to make them.
• Brands and agencies with interviews, events and customer stories to turn into posts.

The signals to look for: long videos every week, a real audience already, and few or no clips. A creator who already runs a clipping campaign is a good sign too: they budget for clips. See how to find clipping campaigns.

Nobody hires a clipper on a promise. They hire one whose clips they've already watched. You can have that proof in days:

1. Clip your own channel or a campaign. Clips you've posted with permission, and the views they got, are the best portfolio there is.
2. Make samples for each prospect. Three clips from their latest video, cut to whole sentences, framed vertically and captioned, in a style that fits them.
3. Send them privately. Samples are for the creator's eyes. Posting someone's video without permission can get the clips taken down and your account with them; see is clipping legal?

Three samples from one video is a few minutes of work with a clipping tool. An hour-long episode is 60 credits on Clyper, however many clips you take from it, up to 30: pick the three with the strongest hooks.

• YouTube itself. Search your niche for full episodes, interviews and streams, then open the channels: a channel with long videos every week and an empty or quiet Shorts tab is a prospect. YouTube's search filters can narrow results to videos, Shorts or channels.
• Podcast charts. Browse a category's charts in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and check which shows also post video episodes on YouTube.
• Clipping marketplaces. Creators who post campaigns are already paying for clips. Do good work on their campaign first, and you have a reason to offer more.
• Communities. Creator Discords, subreddits and the replies under creators' posts, where you can be useful before you pitch.

To reach them: many channels list an email for business inquiries in their About section, under View email address, if the owner has added one. Podcasts usually have a website or contact page, and the show notes often name who handles business.

A creator gets a lot of messages. Yours should take ten seconds to understand and show the work before it asks for anything:

• Lead with the clips. Attach them, or link them. If you can't attach anything, send the exact moment instead: the YouTube clip maker makes a link that plays just that part.
• Name the moment, so they know you watched: the question, the story, the minute.
• Make one small ask: a pilot week, not a contract.
• Follow up once, a few days later, with one more clip. Then let it go.

Cold email has rules. In the US, the CAN-SPAM Act covers business email too: no misleading subject lines or sender details, say that it's an offer, include your postal address, tell people how to opt out, and honor an opt-out within 10 business days. Other countries have their own rules, some of them stricter: check them before you email people abroad. And never send the same message to a list: a pitch with someone's own clips in it can't be a mass email anyway.

• A pilot week. A set number of clips from their next video or two, delivered on time. It lets them see your work and you see theirs, before either of you commits.
• A monthly package. A set number of clips a month, for example 20, 40 or 60, delivered on a fixed day each week.
• What's included, in writing: how fast you deliver, how many changes, the caption style, and whether you post or just deliver.

For what to charge for each, see how much to charge for clipping, and for running it as a business, how to start a clipping agency.

Clients stay when the clips arrive every week, on time. That's a workflow problem: batch each client's new videos, pick the best clips, polish, deliver. On Clyper Studio, paste up to 10 links at once, with priority processing, and sort each video's clips by hook score.

Know what serving a client costs you. Billed yearly, a clip on Studio costs about $0.10, before your time, at every size:

3 clients at 60 clips a month is 180 clips, inside Pro's 200. One Studio covers about 8 clients at that volume; past that, a bigger size gives more at the same price per clip.

• Deliver on the same day every week. Reliability is most of what a client pays for.
• Send a short report each month: what you posted, the views, the three best clips, and what you'll try next.
• Get better at their audience. Note which moments and hooks did best, and make more like them.
• Ask for a referral or a quote once the results are good, and use their clips as samples only with their permission.

For a client who pays per view, like a campaign, the clipping earnings calculator shows what a month of views comes to.