Ran clipping campaigns for major artists before ClipRad existed as a company. The biggest mistake I see labels make when they finally decide to try short-form: they optimize the wrong number.

Views are vanity if they're not tied to a source. A clip that does 400K views but nobody can tell it's tied to the artist's new single is worth less than a clip that does 80K views and drives 2K people to search the song. Retention through the first 3 seconds and whether the caption/on-screen text actually names the song or artist matter more than raw reach.

The other thing nobody tells you: clipper incentive structure changes clip quality. If you pay a flat rate per clip, you get volume and no effort past the minimum. If you pay on performance (views/engagement), clippers self-select the best moments from your footage because their payout depends on it — they're not going to waste a post on a bad cut. That's the whole reason we built ClipRad around performance-based payouts instead of flat fees: it aligns the clipper's incentive with the label's actual goal, which is attention that converts back to the artist, not just a number in a dashboard.

If you're a label or artist team sitting on a backlog of unused performance footage, interviews, or BTS content — that's the highest-ROI place to start, before you spend a dollar on new content production.