Guru in clipping highlights rising threat from black market advertising

(AsiaGameHub) –   Social media platforms are growing increasingly saturated with anonymous accounts sharing the same viral clips.

At first glance, there may seem to be no clear pattern to why these accounts post identical videos. But a closer look reveals an entire industry of “clippers”, who are paid to edit and distribute content across social media platforms, with their earnings directly tied to the number of views each clip receives.

Anthony Fujiwara, Founder of Clipping, one of the companies leading the industrialization of this content strategy, told Forbes that top-earning clippers can make between $30,000 and $40,000 per month.

Clipping can charge clients as little as a few cents per million views, meaning advertising costs through this clipping model are far lower than through other traditional advertising channels. Brands or content creators will often share content via Google Drive for clippers to download and repost through their own personal accounts.

He stated in his interview with Forbes: “I remember a traditional platform charging $25,000 for one million views. For us, a million views could cost somewhere between just a hundred dollars to a thousand dollars.”

According to Bloomberg, Clipping generated $7.7m in revenue last year, and counts major industry giants including Netflix and Amazon Prime among its largest clients.

But how does gambling connect to this practice?

Multiple studies have repeatedly shown that illegal gambling operators target players through social media, since the platform faces far less regulation than other advertising channels.

The chance to go viral on social media also makes clipping a far more lucrative opportunity for many gambling brands. In previous cases, clips of streamers such as Adin Ross playing on platforms like Stake have been shared thousands of times over by fan accounts, boosting the brand’s visibility to potentially millions of potential players.

For policymakers and regulators in markets such as the UK, where MPs are currently pushing for stricter gambling advertising rules, this clipping practice creates a major challenge.

Social media clips featuring the logos of Stake and fellow crypto casino Rainbet also appeared in Louis Theroux’s documentary investigating the ‘manosphere’, and were almost certainly produced by editors working under a similar model to Clipping’s.

The people posting these clips are based all around the world. Fujiwara noted that Clipping’s top earners are based in countries including India, the Philippines and Serbia – meaning that enforcement agencies are often dependent on social media platforms themselves to take action.

However, already this year, the Gambling Commission’s Executive Director of Research and Policy, Tim Miller, has publicly criticized Meta for failing to crack down on illegal gambling advertising.

For social media companies, there is little incentive to remove these short clips, because the views they generate also create a revenue stream for the platform itself.

Furthermore, even if platforms do ban accounts or remove content, the highly profitable nature of clipping means content posters will simply create new accounts to continue their work. The whole process effectively becomes a game of whack-a-mole.

Forbes noted that the majority of clipping campaigns do not include required paid promotion labels, as mandated by government regulators such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). However, the general consensus is that the FTC is unlikely to take enforcement action against small micro-influencers posting these clips.

In a recent Westminster Hall Debate, Dr Beccy Cooper MP, Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Gambling Reform, stated that she believes black market advertising can be tackled – pointing to the success of the UK’s crackdown on the black market tobacco industry after the country introduced new regulations around the sale and promotion of tobacco products.

But making a meaningful impact on the scale of black market advertising across social media comes with inherently different challenges, given that the entire activity takes place in a digital space.

For example, unlike illicit tobacco suppliers, black market advertisers do not need a physical location to store stock, meaning they can easily stay well out of reach of enforcement action.

Newly released research confirms that advertising spend for black market operators in the UK is set to keep rising, while spend for the regulated gambling sector is declining, so brands like Stake and Rainbet have an entire army of editors ready to share viral content featuring their logos with a captivated audience of millions.