Eknoor Singh is 22, lives in London, and says he needs only a mobile phone and a decent internet connection to earn more than £120,000 a year.
He is a professional "clipper". Clients pay him to cut their long videos into short vertical ones and post them, hoping they travel. "The more views a clip gets, the more money I make," he says.
How the trade works
A client — a clothing brand, a record label, a film studio, a podcaster, an influencer — has a long video. The clipper watches it, cuts 30 to 60-second extracts of the best moments, and uploads them to Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or elsewhere.
Clippers are typically 16 to 25, and that is the point: the client is buying a judgement about what will land with that age group.
Rates run to about $3 (£2.30) per 1,000 views across platforms. Singh says he was hooked after making $300 from a short clip of Dua Lipa on Instagram. "I was like, OK, this is a lot of money for simply posting a video." He now says he earns at least £10,000 a month, and cites a clip of Sabrina Carpenter at the Met Gala as one that travelled.
Ethan Weems, 24, in Wichita, Kansas, makes "at least $1,000 a month" clipping for a YouTube podcaster — a side income that lets him work from home with his wife and young son rather than commute to an office.
The sentence that should be the headline
Social media consultant Lia Haberman supplies the correction: "It mirrors the creator economy more broadly. The vast majority make little to nothing."
That is the structure of every pay-per-view market. Earnings do not cluster around an average; a few people collect most of the money and the distribution has a very long tail of people earning nothing at all. £120,000 is real and it is also not a typical outcome — it is the figure that gets a story written, which is precisely why it should not be read as a benchmark.
What it means in Bangladesh
This is a real route into international income for Bangladeshi freelancers, and the barriers are genuinely low: no degree, no studio, no client acquisition if you work through a clipping programme, and a phone will do. Editing short vertical video is a skill that can be learned from free material in weeks.
Two things make the picture different from London, and both are structural rather than about talent.
The first is payout. Platform monetisation and the agencies that run clipping campaigns pay into accounts and payment rails that are awkward to reach from Bangladesh. The work can be done here; collecting for it is where this breaks down, and it is the question to settle before starting, not after a clip succeeds.
The second is that the judgement being sold is cultural. Singh is paid because he knows what a British or American 19-year-old will stop scrolling for. That instinct does not transfer automatically, and the honest version of this opportunity is that a Bangladeshi clipper is competing on editing speed and price rather than on taste — until they build an audience of their own, which is a different job.
The ownership question underneath all of it — who gets paid when a clip of someone else's work goes viral — is in the piece on X paying the original poster.
Source: BBC News.
