Crypto Marketing’s Shift From Influencers To Clipping
Pudgy Penguins, by Toikido, are displayed at the 2023 Toy Fair, in New York’s Javits Center, Monday, Oct. 2, 2023. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
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“In 2025, there was one influencer who we paid $30,000 to promote an exchange. And he got one sign up,” Rhys McKay said in an interview. “Like, globally known guy, one sign up.”
A few years earlier, that spend would have paid off. Before founding the short-form video agency Lumina Clippers, McKay spent five years running a crypto marketing firm that he says put $30 million into influencer campaigns. His firm used to pay a crypto influencer “forty thousand dollars for a tweet,” and in 2021 and 2022, he says, “if they were promoting a token or an exchange… the brand would have got return on investment due to the amount of conversions.” By 2025 that was gone.
McKay’s problem is now the whole industry’s. Crypto and fintech brands are pulling money out of paid endorsements and putting it into two cheaper channels. One is clipping: paying thousands of freelancers to cut and post short videos. The other is “edits,” where fans make their own videos of a brand’s characters, for free. Traditional paid social runs roughly $20 to $80 per thousand views. Clipping runs $1 to $5.
‘The audience is already saturated’
“Influencers have already promoted 100 plus brands in some cases, where if you’re the 101st brand in queue, the audience is already saturated,” McKay said. “The influencer no longer has the influence over the audience to buy the products because they’ve saturated their audience so much.”
He is not the only marketer who backed away. James Sixsmith, chief executive of the futures-trading firm Take Profit Trader, said his company pulled its influencer program in-house after it became unmanageable. “It’s just hard to manage a thousand influencers at a time, so we just made the decision to scale that back and then pick up the slack and do a lot of what they were doing for us in-house,” Sixsmith said on the On The Margin podcast.
The clip army
“We have 62,000 vetted clippers and 5,000 UGC creators,” McKay said, describing the network Lumina Clippers uses to chop long-form footage into short clips and flood TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. Clippers are paid per thousand views, capped at 100,000 views a clip so no single video drains a budget.
Daniel Bitton, who runs a rival clipping marketplace, put the economics plainly. “The average CPM on our platform is around a dollar, which if you compare that to the average paid CPM of like 40 to 80 dollars, it’s a no-brainer for companies to try this,” Bitton said on the same podcast. “We’re the marketplace of virality, essentially.”
Clips also outlast the budget. “If you’re paying for traditional ads, whenever you stop your budgets and your ads, there is zero more views accumulated after that point,” McKay said. “But clips last forever. You’ll watch a clip this month and someone else will watch that same clip two years from now.” The model has moved well beyond crypto: brands from OKX to Adobe and Algorand appear in agency client lists, and Netflix, Polymarket and Kalshi have all run clip campaigns.
The volume invites junk, which McKay says is why vetting matters. “There’s a lot of open source marketplaces where anyone can just sign up, they can get their grandma to sign up. Even their dog, if you can pass KYC, they can begin uploading clips,” he said. “You have to go through an application process. We vet your account, we look at the analytics of your videos.”
The organic halo
Paying for distribution is one bet. Not paying is the other. Zaid Attari, who once handled marketing for the NFT brand Pudgy Penguins, argues the most valuable content is the kind fans make for free, a format he calls “edits.”
“Whenever someone sees a clip on social media, they’re not incentivized to do it for free,” Attari said in a voice memo. “Either they scroll away, or they enjoy the clip, or they go to the clipping campaign and get paid for it. Vice versa with edits. It’s a very passionate form of creative marketing.” A good edit makes fans want to make more. “It causes an organic halo… for them to do it for free unprompted by us,” he said.
His proof is Pengu, the Pudgy Penguins character, which got pulled into “Tim Cheese x John Pork,” a real “brain rot” meme trend that swept TikTok in 2025. Attari credits seeded edits, and says the crossover “generated around 250 million impressions in less than two weeks… all inspired of the edits that we had seeded.” He called it “the eye-opener for what edits does for one character IP for a tech brand.” The character’s presence in the trend is documented; the 250 million figure is his own. Pudgy Penguins still spends on paid reach too, taking over the Las Vegas Sphere over the 2025 holidays at a reported cost near half a million dollars.
The edits case rests on what people actually watch. “What people were actually watching in the video was the video. They didn’t really care about the product,” said Matt, a founder of the social app Lockit, on the On The Margin podcast, describing why organic content beats overt ads.
The catch
“Clipping is great for awareness,” McKay said. “It’s a little harder to track direct conversion too… one of the bigger problems in this space.” Brands watch views and reshares climb without a clear count of who actually bought.
Disclosure is the other risk. Undisclosed clipping and edits run the same play that cost Kim Kardashian a $1.26 million SEC fine in 2022, and prediction markets including Polymarket and Kalshi have already drawn scrutiny over campaigns that blurred the paid-versus-organic line.
McKay is unmoved. “I believe the only way to do that in 2026 is through clips,” he said. “If you want consistency, you need clips.”
