WTF is clipping? The low-lift creator strategy grabbing advertisers’ attention
May 26, 2025 – Media MentionJesse Saivar, Chair of Greenberg Glusker's Intellectual Property and Digital Media & Technology Groups, shared valuable insights with Digiday about the legal ambiguities surrounding the practice of sharing short clips from longer content, commonly referred to as "clipping."
Excerpts
Jesse Saivar, an IP lawyer at the firm Greenberg Glusker, said that the mainstream advertisers he works with are focused on complying with FTC guidelines and are aware of the risks that come with breaking them. However, he said that smaller brands and creators were extremely unlikely to be punished for violating the FTC’s guidelines due to the government agency’s inability to monitor the sheer volume of paid clips posted on social channels.
“Is the FTC going to come down on some micro-influencer who’s posted a 30-second video? The reality is almost certainly not, because they just don’t have the bandwidth to do so,” Saivar said. “That is likely why there’s so much out there that that does violate the FTC endorsement guidelines.”
Saivar said that brands that are “already kind of in legal gray areas,” such as investment apps, cryptocurrency firms and AI companies, are more likely to take on the potential risk of advertising through clips that potentially violate FTC guidelines. He added that platforms like Whop, which formalize the clipping process, also take on an inordinate amount of risk in doing so, as they present an easy target for the FTC to curb rule-breaking clipping activity. Whop’s terms and conditions for clippers explicitly require them to follow the FTC’s disclosure guidelines, but the platform does not currently have an enforcement method in place to ensure that all clippers follow these rules all of the time.
“Could the FTC maybe kill a bunch of birds with one stone by going after a middleman? I would think there was some risk there,” Saivar said.
