Anthony Fujiwara is the founder of Clipping Exe, also known as the creator of clipping, the video marketing phenomenon that have contributed to the rise of crypto casinos like Stake.com
Clipping Exe
Stake, the Curaçao-based crypto casino, generated $4.7 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2024, according to multiple reports. It didn’t build that brand with banner ads.
Much of Stake’s visibility came from thousands of young people downloading short clips from a Google Drive, posting them across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, and earning as little as two cents per thousand views. No employment contracts. Almost no FTC disclosures. Just a Discord server, a meritocratic ladder system, and relentless volume. A single campaign for streamer Adin Ross (who was earning roughly $1 million a week from Stake, according to Dexerto) generated 430 million views from 11,000 videos posted by 520 clippers, Bloomberg reported.
The strategy eventually caught up with Stake. After an adult content creator’s video surfaced with a Stake watermark in early 2025, apparently added by a third-party clipping network, the UK Gambling Commission forced the company to surrender its British license. A class-action lawsuit followed in December, naming Drake, Adin Ross, and Stake.
But the man who industrialized clipping isn’t slowing down. Anthony Fujiwara, 23, didn’t invent the practice. He credits Andrew Tate and Luke Belmar with pioneering the clip-for-cash model through their online courses. What Fujiwara did was turn it into a scalable business. Bloomberg reported in October that his company, simply called Clipping, had generated roughly $7.7 million in revenue with some 23,300 contract editors. The operation behind Clavicular, the 19-year-old Kick streamer whose “looksmaxxing” content turned him into one of the platform’s biggest names earlier this year, is also Fujiwara’s. Some people know him as the ‘creator of clipping’.
The attention arbitrage
Clipping sits at the intersection of a larger structural shift. “Generative AI is deflationary for content production but is inflationary for distribution,” wrote Eric Seufert, the ad-tech analyst behind Mobile Dev Memo, in February 2026. His argument: as AI drives digital production costs toward zero, the expensive part becomes distribution, getting anyone to actually watch. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel made the same point days earlier. “Before, so many of their resources were dedicated to engineering,” he told TBPN. “Now, I think people are going to be much more focused on marketing, on distribution, and that’s a big shift.”
More than a billion short-form videos are now posted across platforms every day. The flood makes getting seen harder and more expensive, unless you have an army of humans doing it for you. Traditional social media ads run $8 to $25 per thousand views depending on the platform. Fujiwara’s clippers deliver the same reach for pennies. “I remember a platform having it costing $25,000 for a million views,” Fujiwara said in an interview. “For us, a million views could just be like a hundred dollars to a thousand dollars.”
That price gap is drawing serious money. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Capitol Music Group are all now clients, according to Fujiwara and Bloomberg. Dante Smith, SVP and head of Motown Digital at Capitol Music Group, told Bloomberg that clipping is “a way to promote your artists through an organic UGC format,” and confirmed campaigns for artists including Ice Spice and Offset.
The kid with the cracked Premiere
Fujiwara started at 16 or 17 with what he describes as “a really, really shitty laptop and a cracked version of Premiere.” He began by editing clips of Fortnite streamers, but quickly realized that gameplay wasn’t what held attention. “It’s a lot harder for people to become attached to pixels on a screen,” he said. “If there’s an actual face to it, people can make a parasocial relationship with them.”
He climbed the creator economy’s informal ladder: Fortnite streamers, then bigger YouTubers, then names like IShowSpeed, whom he’s edited since late 2020, and eventually brands. Now represented by Hollywood talent agencies, he still edits Speed’s videos in real time during live streams, racing, as he puts it, “to be the first person on the entire platform to get the video out.” Streaming platforms now send him full episodes before release so he can identify the three or four moments worth clipping.
How the machine works
Clipping operates through a central Discord with roughly 60,000 members, though the active contractor base is smaller. Brands supply content via Google Drive. Clippers download, post to fan accounts, and get paid per view. Bloomberg reported rates between $300 and $1,500 per million views. Clients pay $2,500 to $10,000 a month.
The enforcement is blunt: two rule violations and you’re permanently removed. Human auditors review every post. If a brand rejects a video, it gets pulled and the clipper doesn’t get paid.
The operation is now processing millions of dollars a month in stablecoin payments to clippers, Fujiwara said, a workaround for a globally distributed contractor base that includes top earners in the Philippines, Serbia, and India.
For those who make it, the earnings are real. “We’ve got some clippers that are making doctor-level money,” Fujiwara said. “A couple have already crossed a million dollars in revenue. But most would be making like $200,000, $300,000.” Top earners run networks of 20-plus accounts across multiple campaigns, pulling in $30,000 to $40,000 a month.
The music industry has become the fastest-growing client base. Fujiwara described management companies spending $100,000 a week after seeing two- to three-times returns, at CPMs as low as two cents. Musician Russ reportedly spent $20,000 on clipping campaigns through the platform Whop and generated over 50 million views, according to The Black Hoody newsletter.
The competition is consolidating
Fujiwara isn’t the only one industrializing this. Whop, the social commerce platform that took a $200 million investment from Tether in February at a $1.6 billion valuation, has emerged as the largest rival. “Some people think that Whop is the clipping platform. ” CEO Steven Schwartz said on the On The Margin podcast, referring to the misconception in the market. Whop’s content rewards product, relaunched in late 2025 in partnership with founder Daniel Bitton’s marketplace, now pays out more than $40,000 a day across nearly a million videos a month for clients including Polymarket, Eleven Labs, and Justin Bieber, according to Bitton.
“We’re the marketplace of virality, essentially,” Bitton said in an interview, projecting 30 to 40 billion views in April alone. His pitch to brands rests on a CPM gap that mirrors Fujiwara’s. “The average CPM on our platform is around a dollar,” Bitton said, “which if you compare that to the average paid CPM of like 40 to $80, it’s a no-brainer for companies to try this.”
Why AI can’t replace this, yet
The obvious question is why AI hasn’t made clipping obsolete. If the job is picking clips and posting them, surely a bot can do it faster.
Fujiwara is disarmingly honest. “If these companies were good enough, clipping in theory wouldn’t exist,” he said. “But realistically, AI just can’t do that right now. Only human beings can.”
The evidence supports him. A peer-reviewed study published on ResearchGate found that human-only TikTok ads significantly outperformed AI-generated ones on completion rate and view-through. A Bynder survey of 2,000 consumers found that 52% disengage when they believe content is AI-made. And when one content creator tested an AI clipping tool that generated roughly 300 videos over three weeks, the best performer managed 2,500 views, a rounding error by clipping standards.
AI’s failure here is, ironically, the point. It validates the thesis that production is the cheap part. The scarce resource is knowing which two seconds of a livestream will stop someone mid-scroll. That’s still a human skill.
The risks
Stake’s implosion illustrates how fast clipping can go wrong. Beyond the UK license loss, a separate exposé in December 2024 revealed that Stake had been running a covert network of X/Twitter meme accounts watermarked with its logo. An anonymous account, @BadTwtProfiles, infiltrated the Discord running the campaign and exposed it publicly. Elon Musk posted about it. The accounts were suspended within days.
The broader legal risk remains largely untested. FTC endorsement guidelines require disclosure of paid promotions, and clipping campaigns almost never carry them. Penalties can reach $51,744 per violation. But enforcement at the micro-influencer level is widely considered unlikely. “Is the FTC going to come down on some micro-influencer who’s posted a 30-second video?” attorney Jesse Saivar told Digiday. “The reality is almost certainly not.”
For brands in regulated industries (gambling, finance, crypto), the calculus is different. Stake’s experience shows that cheap attention can become very expensive when a campaign goes sideways. Fujiwara’s response is pragmatic: “Every time we run into a certain issue, we just try to pivot it and add the guardrails.”
Where this is heading
The guardrails may matter less than the momentum. MrBeast, YouTube’s most-subscribed creator, launched his own clipping platform, Vyro, in October 2025, paying $3 per thousand views. Creator economy ad spending reached $37 billion in 2025, growing four times faster than the overall media industry, according to the IAB. YouTube Shorts alone now draws 200 billion daily views, up from 30 billion when the format launched in 2021.
Seufert, the analyst, frames the endgame in blunt terms. “The analytical, sterile process of refining attention into a finished good (monetization) will dominate,” he wrote. “That may be the antithesis of taste.”
Fujiwara wouldn’t put it that way. He’s still the kid staring at a screen for 14 hours a day, scrubbing through raw livestream footage and asking himself the same question he’s been asking since he was 16 with a cracked copy of Premiere: which two seconds will make you stop scrolling?