The clipping glossary

Aspect ratio is the relationship between a video's width and its height, written as two numbers such as 9:16 or 16:9, and it determines how much of a viewer's screen the video fills on any given platform.

B-roll is secondary footage inserted over or between the primary shots of a video, used to illustrate what is being said, disguise a cut, or maintain visual interest when the main shot alone would not hold attention.

Burned-in captions are subtitles rendered directly into the video's pixels during export, making them a permanent part of the image that always displays, in contrast to closed captions which are a separate track the viewer or platform can switch off.

A clipper is a video editor who takes someone else's long-form content — podcasts, streams, interviews or talks — cuts the strongest moments into short vertical clips, and posts them on social platforms, typically earning through paid campaigns rather than a salary or client fees.

A clipping agency is a business that produces short-form clips from clients' long-form content at volume, employing or contracting a team of editors and selling the output as a managed service rather than as individual freelance edits.

A clipping bounty is a paid campaign in which a creator or brand funds a reward pool and pays clippers a set rate per 1,000 verified views on short clips they cut from that creator's long-form content and post to their own social accounts.

A content reward campaign is a marketing programme in which a brand or creator funds a pool and pays participants out of it according to the measured performance of the content they publish, instead of paying a fixed fee per post.

Engagement rate is the proportion of people who interacted with a post out of everyone who saw it, calculated by dividing total interactions such as likes, comments, shares and saves by views or reach, and expressed as a percentage.

A faceless channel is a social media account that publishes video without the person running it ever appearing on camera, assembling content instead from other people's footage, stock video, screen recordings or voiceover.

A hook is the opening one to three seconds of a short-form video, designed to give the viewer an immediate reason to keep watching rather than scroll, and it is the strongest single predictor of how far a clip spreads.

Rate per 1,000 views is the amount a campaign pays for every one thousand verified views a piece of content receives, so a rate of $2.50 pays $25 for a clip that reaches 10,000 views.

Content repurposing is the practice of turning a single piece of content into multiple different pieces — such as cutting one long video into many short clips, or turning a podcast into quotes, articles and audiograms — so that one unit of production work reaches several audiences and platforms.

Retention rate is the percentage of viewers still watching a video at a given point, and in short-form video the figure that matters most is the proportion who reach the end, since platforms promote clips that hold attention to completion.

A safe zone is the central region of a video frame that platform interface elements — usernames, captions, buttons and progress bars — do not cover, and anything essential to the video must be placed inside it to remain visible.

A sentence-boundary cut is an edit that begins and ends a clip at the start and end of complete spoken sentences, determined from word-level transcript timings, so the clip never opens or closes part-way through a word or phrase.

Short-form video is vertical video, typically under three minutes and often under sixty seconds, distributed through algorithmic recommendation feeds such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts rather than to an existing subscriber base.

A thumbnail is the static preview image that represents a video before playback begins, and on platforms where viewers choose what to watch from a grid or list it is the single largest factor in whether a video is clicked.

A UGC creator is someone paid to produce user-generated-style content — typically casual, phone-shot video — that the commissioning brand then publishes on its own channels or uses in paid advertising, rather than the creator posting it to their own following.

Vertical video is video with a taller-than-wide aspect ratio, almost always 9:16, which fills a phone screen held upright and is the required format for TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and comparable short-form feeds.

View verification is the process of confirming that the views reported on a piece of content came from real people before those views are paid out, by examining the shape of the view curve, the ratio of engagement to reach, and the behaviour of the account that posted it.

Watch time is the total accumulated duration that all viewers spend watching a video, calculated as the number of views multiplied by the average duration watched, and it is the metric most video platforms optimise their recommendations around.

Word-level transcription is speech-to-text output in which every individual word carries its own start and end timestamp, rather than timings being given only for whole lines or blocks of text.