Creative Apps, Faceless Content, Clipping & Platform Arbitrage
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This edition is a walkthrough of my thought explorations from last week, along with some organic marketing ideas and insights I picked up along the way.
Creative Apps’ Endless Distribution
Daze Chat is a great example of the organic distribution you can achieve with a creative app. They’ve hit 54M views across two accounts (some of those views were paid).
They could have scaled even further by multiplying across more accounts.
They had endless creative assets to fuel their pre-launch strategy.
If you’re interested in scaling creative-driven app distribution, check out how Humans Anonymous scaled faceless creatives across a dozen accounts, or how Jammable is pushing their infinite creatives through hundreds of affiliate accounts.
I wouldn’t build a consumer app again without designing the UI with TikTok distribution in mind.
I made this mistake twice… in a row.
With consumer apps, success is tied to your ability to distribute. And to distribute fast. Especially when a network effect is involved.
Faceless or Not Faceless
When starting organic social growth, everyone’s first instinct is to figure out how to execute and scale faceless creatives.
It seems easier than “faceful” content since one doesn’t have to put himself out there.
It’s often an illusion. Faceless competition is fearless.
Low-quality faceless content is doomed. It doesn’t stand a chance.
And low-quality faceless AI content is even worse.
Don’t you find it “strange” that none of the auto AI short generator apps have managed to get a viral video on their main accounts (I’ve documented 50+):
Still, there are too many success stories for you to ignore.
There are no secrets, to nail it, you have to experiment with hundreds, if not thousands, of videos or posts, until you hit the jackpot.
The scientific approach is to use one format across three accounts. And to test multiple formats at the same time.
This helps reduce the “luck” factor and turn the process into… science.
Rizz, Astro and ColorAnalysis AI are excellent reads on faceless strategies.
Clipping, Clipping, Clipping
Last week, I talked to someone who manages mass content production for the movie industry.
They have a team of 300+ clippers who, for every movie or TV show release, create accounts, make clips, and distribute them—getting paid based on views.
I found it fascinating.
If you listen to major YouTubers, they’re constantly being clipped, with shorts they didn’t create themselves getting millions of views.
It could be seen as a huge loss, but instead, the smartest of them view it as free distribution (not that they have much choice).
The real money is in long-form content, and the real value is in long-term users.
The magic of clipping is that it helps your content spread faster without you having to do anything.
I do believe that every long-form podcaster or YouTuber should have a clipping team or agency spreading perfectly optimized clips… even slightly ahead of release.
Similar to mobile app “waitlist” strategies.
Platform To Platform Clipping Arbitrage
To go deeper into clipping, the real gains for you & me, come from platform-to-platform content arbitrage.
Clipping and sharing YouTube content on TikTok or Twitter within your niche will yield views by tapping into the unique audiences on those platforms.
I do this myself on Twitter, clipping YouTube podcasts and reframing them.
This clip got a quarter million views, and this one hit half a million views.
On TikTok, you can find examples like Hawk Motivation (covered here) and hundreds of similar pages doing millions of impressions through platform arbitrage.
Make sure to find a way to use clipping to boost your distribution:
Any fresh content you can find, remix, and repurpose to promote your narrative is an opportunity you should take advantage of.
If you don’t do it, someone else will.
Engagement Groups & Weaker Algorithms
Note: This newsletter is completely apolitical.
I just saw this political tweet a few days ago, and it reminded me that engagement groups (or sometimes botnets) are incredibly effective at manipulating social platforms with weaker algorithms like Reddit, LinkedIn or Twitter.
Reddit manipulation is so easy & quite interesting now that most posts rank high in SERPs, so just by pushing up comments to the top of a thread, you can rack up hundreds of clicks.
A few years back, I made a botnet on Quora and made a few thousand dollars by pushing affiliate links through NordVPN answers.
Then I realized that I wasn’t alone. A way bigger botnet was pushing my answers down and outranking me with theirs. It became a constant fight, and i lost…
But again… game theory.
If you don’t do it, someone else will.
All these games are rigged anyway, so why wouldn’t you?
Take LinkedIn’s friend-to-friend algorithm. It’s packed with engagement groups. A good friend of mine walked me through how LinkedIn creators use them.
Those are often paid groups.
It’s become a huge business. And as the creator economy grows, it’ll just keep getting bigger.
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