The Internet Codes: Streaming & Clipping
A guide to the fringe internet for marketers, brand owners and creatives
Keeping up with the shifts in media consumption has become a genuine challenge for anyone working in the brand world. Consumers understand their own media patterns but rarely stop to understand anyone else’s. In advertising and marketing especially, this is a problem. The industry is over-reliant on an outdated media ecosystem, and even its social media thinking tends to be more specific and antiquated than what actual consumers are engaging with.
Last weekend I released a YouTube video called “The Internet Codes” and I wanted to accompany it with explanations of some of the new trends I share there.
This essay breaks down a small set of interlocking concepts I think matter as you prepare for what future consumers will engage with, and how that looks different from elder Gen Z, Millennial, and Gen X media consumption. I’m also going to explain how some of these new media codes are being used for PR damage control and to spread messages at a scale most people in traditional media can’t quite picture.
If you have any questions about this, I’m workshopping brand content strategy live next Tuesday on my March community call and live training, you can join here.
The Normie to Fringe Chart, Revisited
You may have seen the Normie to Fringe chart I released in the 2026 brand strategy workshop materials. It’s a scale I’ve started using constantly. It maps brand goals against the new platforms worth exploring, and it matters because far more brands in the $50M+ range have a brand awareness problem with new consumers than they realize.
On both ends of that chart, sales and awareness, there’s a format worth understanding: live video. Someone on camera talking to an audience, sometimes large, sometimes small.
On the sales end of the curve, that’s live selling. On TikTok Shop and similar platforms, a host or creator sells items people can purchase in real time. It’s not an accident that QVC has become a top seller on TikTok Shop. It’s a prominent purchase method overseas that’s been gaining real traction domestically. A surprising number of the top live sellers on TikTok Shop are Spanish-language creators. I call these out because they’re a good illustration of different consumer types buying on channels in ways most brands haven’t thought to explore yet. If you want a fringe-but-sales-focused channel to test, this is one.
On the awareness end of the curve, you have general live streaming. This primarily happens on Twitch. Its competitor Kick is gaining ground. YouTube has its own version. And for a much smaller but specific market, there’s X.
Why You Should Pay Attention to Live Streaming
Gen Alpha and the younger end of Gen Z have live streaming on for a meaningful portion of their day. When they’re doing homework, hanging out, playing games, there’s a stream running on a monitor or a phone. In those streams you’ll see popular creators like Kai Cenat, niche gamers, and cultural events like the 30-day livestreams you may have heard about.
The same dynamic is playing out with other demographics. More older professionals than ever have discovered this through TBPN on X. They bring on tech leadership from Travis Kalanick to Marc Benioff during multi-hour streams that tech workers keep on in the background while they’re vibe coding. Think of it as one long podcast, but with a key difference.
It’s passive. Little is being retained in any active way, its on in the background of daily work. But when something does land, it’s interactive, and shareable. You can drop a comment, get a response, or at least engage with others in the chat in real time. And with smaller streamers especially, there’s a real sense that if you have a question, you can just ask it and get an answer.
I’m calling all of this out to set up the next section, which is about clipping. But first: why should any brand consider streaming for awareness?
If your target market skews male, say 21 to 30, you probably have a rough sense of how you’re reaching them now, or you’re starting to feel like that’s slipping. Consider that in five years, the entirety of that consumer demographic is going to consume this type of media, and not lightly. The majority of their first introductions to brands they’d otherwise just know, your Right Guards, your Old Spices, brands young men were always assumed to just buy, are going to come from things they encountered in and around streaming. If you don’t want to lose that demographic entirely, you need to start building a presence in that ecosystem now. Whether that means participating, sponsoring, or just developing a plan.
This is where the traditional agency model starts to break down. They don’t have the fluency to navigate it. They did a terrible job with new wave social media and most still haven’t figured it out (Vayner made a generational run by simply getting it). On Meta there are some agencies doing good work, on paid search and email slightly more. But on the cutting edge front, the curve is going to get steeper and faster, and it’s going to leave more and more brands without a real answer or partner to help.
Clipping
Streaming isn’t just about what happens live. It’s about what happens to that content afterward.
A clipper is someone who takes longer-form media, a seven-hour stream, a long YouTube video, even older short-form clips, and repurposes them for virality. This works a few ways.
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Sometimes a streamer’s own team does it. TBPN, for example, has accounts where their media team cuts top moments down for promotion. But the more prominent and effective version is the paid ecosystem around clipping. Platforms like Whop and services like Zagged operate on a bounty system where clippers are paid a CPM based on the views they generate. It’s essentially buying traffic, except the content doing the work is organic-feeling video.
These clips typically come from accounts made specifically to clip a lot of content, dedicated accounts for a particular project, and a broader ecosystem of social accounts working in concert. What people from traditional media don’t understand is the scale. Hundreds of clippers might work on a single popular personality. The views compounding across that network can reach into the millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions per day.
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People also use curators. Someone like FearBuck on X aggregates these moments and cross-posts them to audiences who primarily live on legacy social networks (also incentivized, directly from the streamer, platform, or paid by X). The reason anyone would tap X is deliberate manipulation of the older media generation.
By seeding something on Twitter with enough apparent momentum, you create the perception that something is getting big, which then prompts legacy internet users to pay attention. A GQ or New York Times piece about a streamer doesn’t happen without that groundwork being laid first on Twitter to convince legacy media that something is culturally significant.
No one likes to admit they’re being gamed. But this is happening constantly and at scale.
Why This Matters Right Now
This week is a good example. A relatively frivolous lawsuit filed against David protein bar, at its core rooted in a misunderstanding about how calories are measured in certain foods and how a particular ingredient works. (Some context below).
At the same time, a new brand called Leaked Labs, founded by popular influencers the Lipstick Lesbians is releasing new beauty product formulas in small amounts that likely never would have made it to consumers otherwise. They’re in intentionally raw packaging, a brand designed bring things that are developed in labs but not big enough for brands to commit to taking to market at scale for consumers to try, and the reception is uncertain - people dont understand it and the TikTok mob rose up.
I bring both of these up because they generate the kind of complex conversation online that people misread and get angry about, especially on TikTok. Consumers won’t read into it. They assume they’re being screwed. They believe a lawsuit before it’s been decided. They misread a brand’s intent and assume they’re being charged top dollar for something untested. In a social media ecosystem where anger travels faster than nuance, there’s almost no effective way for a brand to control the narrative through traditional channels.
David did the right thing. They got a range of voices, food scientists and people who actually work on the product, in front of their audience to explain exactly what’s happening. They posted organic, they boosted as an ad. That’s the right instinct.
Here’s the problem. Your brand account has limited reach. Your message, no matter how clear and accurate, no matter the dollars you put behind it, will never match the collective reach of thousands of smaller creators all sharing an angry take, regardless of how uneducated that take is. Mainstream media will write about it days later, and the only people who read it will live in New York.
There is no effective way to get your narrative out through any traditional channel.
The only real answer is the ecosystem I just described. Do you have a network of creators who work with you and are willing to distribute your message? Do you have the ability to take a longer, more substantive piece of content and clip it in a way that will actually travel? That last part matters. For something to be clipped has to be compelling enough to move organically. You can incentivize clippers all you want, but if the source material is boring, it goes nowhere.
If you do have compelling content and the right incentive structure, you can get your message out through this ecosystem in a way that no agency is currently set up to help you with. No brands are operating at the fringe enough to understand these tools yet. That’s exactly why I’m writing about it here.
I know people who are larger influencers than me who employ full teams around clipping and spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on it. I just started myself this month. Put my first $10K down, hired an agency (Zagged), and it’s going… mediocre, if I’m being generous. But it’s CPM-based, so mediocre spend means mediocre cost. I’ll keep at it until I crack it, and then we’ll do the same for brands. Because if you are not in the arena today and you’re trying to do modern marketing, you will fail. That’s why I started making content at 37 as a SVP of Marketing, and while I'll continue.
The Jubilee Format
One more concept I want people to understand, and then I’ll connect all of this together.
You’ve probably seen the Jubilee format online. One conservative versus twenty liberals. One millennial against seven angry teachers. A room, a structured debate, a series of people coming up to challenge one person or idea.
People associate it with politics, but it’s spreading fast. A young course seller named Brez Scales, who specializes in a course on using Facebook ads for fashion brands, did over a million views in a single day on YouTube with his version: one course seller versus 10 people who work nine to fives. The premise is clearly scripted. He sits down, works through common objections to making money online, and dismantles them with a calm, confident delivery. He’s endearing, unlike the political ones the air is somewhat friendly… it works.
My friends at Air did a version recently with three generations of marketers. They had Zaria, formerly of Duolingo, a frank and opinionated older Gen X marketer with some… strong takes on DEI and no filter, and a millennial marketer who was a wishy washy stereotype. They debated virality, hiring, cultural relevance. It was good content.
This format matters not just because people watch the full thing, though some do, but because it is engineered for clipping. Every single interaction is an opportunity for a quotable moment, a sharp rebuttal, a trap that gets laid and a point that lands. That’s what travels. Two people having what looks like an organic conversation, one of them making a compelling point aggressively enough that it’s built to be shared.
In a crisis context, the Jubilee format is a serious tool. Imagine the David Protein founder sitting down with twenty skeptics. He knows roughly what they’re going to ask because the objections are already all over the internet. He has his answers, delivers them clearly and likably, and then the clipping ecosystem does its work. The best moments get distributed across the internet for as long as the content has traction or the incentives are in place.
To master modern PR, promotion and crisis comms, you must know the toolkit of new networks and formats, or you are playing an old game that simply can’t compete.
Where This Is All Going
People who look at this and say it’s too fringe, or that they don’t like what it implies about how media works, are describing a world that no longer exists. What came before was a curated media and TV ecosystem that required big dollars and agency access just to get a seat at the table. Now anyone can participate. The dollars only matter if they’re supported by content people actually want to watch. You can throw money at clipping a boring video and get nothing. You can boost dull content and reach people who won’t do anything with it. This is your competition, they suck.
This is the era of organic power. Compelling messages that people actually want to watch find their own life, showcased by people that understand mediums, and there are now multiple ecosystems available to accelerate that at a scale most agencies would find hard to believe.
We are early. If you’re reading this, you are very early. I am terminally early, and I consider that one of my actual skill sets: knowing what’s happening before it’s legible to most people, and turning that into frameworks that are actually usable.
I hope this gave you a real picture of how this ecosystem works and that it stays with you as you start thinking about how any brand or creator participates in it. I’ll keep breaking these down. This is one of many topics circling right now that are going to rewrite how marketing dollars get spent over the next decade.
If you want to talk about some of this live, I committed this year to be doing both live events (shout out everyone that came to tour in Jan and America’s Next Top Snack during Expo West!) and workshopping directly with the community, and March’s live training and Q&A (now you see me participating in the above too…) will be this Tuesday, you can sign up here: http://creativedirector.net/creative-ops
As always…
I am training creative strategists and marketing teams for brands and agencies how to navigate the new world with Creative Strategy
and teaching anyone how to be a creator who actually gets views in Cut30.
Thanks for reading.
-Oren