I was having a very professional conversation on Friday with a very professional colleague talking about growth, affiliate programs, how to scale creators without losing your mind… you know, normal Friday afternoon discussions. He brought up Whop and asked what I thought about clipping as another way to use creator content and get more short-form distribution.

Naturally, I brought up the Joe Budden Podcast… to this older white man…

Because I am, as always, the most professional person you’ve ever met.

But hear me out.

A couple weeks ago, I was minding other people’s business on Threads when I saw the argument about Marc Lamont Hill making extra money clipping the Joe Budden Podcast.

The show has a paid clipping program that lets people take content from the podcast, post clips to their own channels and make money from the distribution. Marc joined too, which meant he was getting paid to be on the podcast in addition to making money distributing clips. I personally think it’s genius and exactly what I would have done.

The cast ended up having an argument about ownership, labor and who gets to make money from what. It’s called Clipper Gate if you want to look it up.

As the very serious marketing lady typing to you right now, I know there’s a much bigger creator program idea sitting inside this conversation.

Most creator programs are still built around what each individual person is supposed to do. The VIP has her deal. Your top affiliates have theirs. Your mid-tier creators have another set of deliverables. Everybody is technically in the same program, but most of the time they’re working in their own little corners.

What happens if the content starts moving between them?

If I have a VIP, podcast partner or even just one creator who consistently makes content people care about, why wouldn’t I think about how the rest of my program can help distribute it?

Maybe the VIP does the big interview. Someone else finds the 45 seconds her audience would actually care about. Another creator adds context around it. An affiliate shares it with a product link. The brand puts money behind the version that performs. Now one partnership is feeding another one.

That’s more interesting to me than simply hiring a bunch of random accounts to repost videos.

Whop is essentially building around this. Brands can upload existing content, set a budget and a rate per thousand views, and let clippers create and distribute short-form versions across platforms. The brand pays based on the views the approved content generates.

And people are getting real distribution from it.

Lovable has a clipping campaign on Content Rewards that has generated more than 24 million views across approved clips. The campaign pays $1 per thousand views and had 243 participating clippers when I checked it.

Twenty-four million views will absolutely get my attention.

Now, before y’all get excited and turn 40 affiliates loose with CapCut, this whole thing needs to be tested. Y’all are getting in at the ground floor of my thought process. Don’t get carried away. Or do, but don’t blame me.

More views are not inherently more business.

That also doesn’t mean I need every view to turn into a trackable sale before I believe it did anything. I talk about attribution enough so I won’t beat that horse. He’s not dead yet, but he’s over me tho.

If somebody sees a creator talk about a product and later buys it at Target, searches for it on Amazon or goes directly to the brand’s website, the creator may have done her job perfectly and still get absolutely no credit for the sale. So I would look at clipping the same way.

What did the extra distribution actually do?