X launches its own clipping feature to spur influencer engagement

Over the past few years, X has released a number of features to make itself a friendlier hub for influencers. The latest effort to attract social media talent? Its own clipping tool.

Clipping is the pivotal social media technique by which longer videos are spliced into TikTok-attention-span length “clips” and then strategically posted to engage as many eyeballs (and, thus, derive as much ad revenue) as possible.

On Monday, X announced the tool, which, from what we can tell, appears to be little more than a straightforward video-trimming feature that lets users edit videos and post them to X.

The site says that every clip includes a “Clip from” label that links back to the original video from which it was derived, allowing X users to see more about the creator and the creator’s content.

“Grab your favorite moment from any video, add your take, and post it without leaving X,” the company posted.

The platform added that both creators and clippers can “earn from views on the clip through Original Content Rewards,” X’s rewards program. The program is only available for eligible creators and pays out based on specific levels of audience engagement.

In many cases, influencers pay special firms to handle clipping for them. More and more large companies are also turning to such services to run marketing campaigns, and the technique has been used in political campaigns as well.

Over the last several years, X has tried to compete with other social sites by expanding the kind of content it supports. To take on sites like YouTube, X introduced long-form videos in 2022 (when the site was still known as Twitter), and they have since taken off on the platform. To be more like Substack, it long ago dispensed with the site’s traditional character limits and introduced long-form blog posts, which are available to premium subscribers.

X has kept at it this year. In March, it added a feature called “exclusive threads” that lets creators put parts of a thread behind a paywall so only subscribers can read them, and in July it launched a live-streaming studio and set aside $1 million for creators who go live.

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Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing [email protected].