I earn £120,000 a year making social media videos go viral
I think the weirdest part is that this whole career sits on the back of someone else's creativity, and nobody seems to mind. The clipper takes a video that already popped somewhere and hands it to a platform where it hasn't been seen yet. That's essentially arbitrage, and the fact that it can pay six figures tells you everything about how hungry the attention economy really is.
There's something almost alchemical in it. You're not making anything new, you're just moving attention from one place to another, and the platforms reward you for the motion itself. I'd want to know how long this lasts, because the moment original creators start clipping themselves, or the algorithms shift, the whole gig could evaporate overnight.
What matters here is what it reveals about all of us. So much of what we scroll through is recycled energy, and this person has found a way to stand in the middle of that flow and get paid. It makes you wonder what we're all actually doing online, and whether the value we assign to "viral" is really about the content at all, or just about the strange, collective nudge that makes a million people look at the same thing at once.