How to run a clipping campaign for your podcast, step by step

To run a clipping campaign for your podcast, you sign up as a brand, write a short brief that tells clippers how to credit the show and what to avoid, upload raw cuts of your episodes, and set a rate per 1,000 verified views and a budget. Clippers download the footage, edit their own 30 to 60 second reels, post them from their own Instagram accounts and submit the links. You pay only for the verified views those reels earn, up to the budget you set.

This is the podcaster's version of the playbook, written for shows and YouTubers in India. It follows how a Clipping campaign is set up on Viewzar, which publishes this blog, but the thinking works for any campaign that pays clippers per view. If you run product campaigns as well, the general guide to running a pay-per-view campaign covers UGC briefs and product maths. This one stays on episodes, footage and clippers.

What a podcast clipping campaign changes

Many podcasters clip their own episodes, or pay one editor a fee per clip. Either way, one person picks the moments, one account posts them, and the show gets a handful of clips a week.

A clipping campaign replaces that with an open brief. Many clippers, each with their own eye and their own accounts, cut the same episode into many different reels at the same time. You do not hire anyone, negotiate or pay per edit. You pay for verified views, which means a clip that flops costs you nothing.

Your job stops being "make clips". It becomes "give clippers great footage and clear rules, then read what worked".

If you are still deciding whether clipping is worth it, read why posting one clip a day will not grow your podcast first. The rest of this guide assumes you are ready to run one.

Step 1: Sign up as a brand and set up your show

On a two-sided marketplace, the side that pays for reels is the brand side, and that includes podcasters, YouTubers and shows. Your show is the brand. Sign up as a brand, then add the show's name, a logo and a short description, since that is what clippers see when they open your campaign.

Write the description for a clipper, not a listener. "Weekly Hindi interviews with founders of Indian D2C brands, 60 to 90 minutes, two cameras" tells an editor what footage to expect and which pages the clips suit.

Step 2: Write a clipping brief clippers can follow

The brief is the only thing a clipper reads before they spend an hour on your footage. It needs to answer five questions fast. How do I credit the show, what should I look for, what must I avoid, what tone do you want, and what label goes on the post.

Copy this template and fill in the brackets.

CLIPPING BRIEF

Show: [name], [language], [topic in one line]
Where the full episodes live: [YouTube channel or podcast name]

Credit (required)
- On screen for the whole clip: "@[showhandle] ft. [Guest Name]"
- First line of the caption: "Clip from @[showhandle] with [Guest Name]"
- Tag @[showhandle] in the post

Moments we want
- Strong opinions, numbers, stories with a turn, practical advice
- Timestamps worth a look: [00:12:40 pricing story], [00:41:05 the argument about funding]

Moments to avoid
- [Anything about the guest's family]
- [The segment from 00:55:00 to 01:02:00]
- Do not cut a guest's words so they seem to say something they did not

Tone: [e.g. sharp and funny, or calm and serious]
Languages allowed for captions: [Hindi, English, Tamil, any]
Disclosure: label every clip #ad, as this is a paid campaign
Length: 30 to 60 seconds, vertical 9:16

Four rules make a clipping brief work.

1. Make the credit line exact. Clippers want to credit you properly. Give them the precise words and handle so every clip points back to the same place.
2. List moments to avoid, not moments to copy. Telling clippers which moments are off limits protects your guests. Telling them which three moments to clip produces thirty versions of the same three clips.
3. Offer timestamps as hints. A few marked moments save editors time on a long episode, but leave room for them to find the moment you missed. They often do.
4. Put the disclosure in. Clips made for a paid campaign are paid content, and ASCI requires paid content in India to be labelled, for example with #ad.

Step 3: Prepare and upload your raw cuts

Raw cuts are the footage clippers work from, usually full episodes or long segments. Their quality sets the ceiling on every clip.

• Upload the best master you have. The highest resolution you recorded, with clean, levelled audio. An editor cannot fix muddy sound in a 40-second reel.
• Include every camera angle if you can. A wide shot and a close-up of each speaker let editors cut between faces, which holds attention better than one static frame. If you only have a mixed edit, that works too.
• Leave out the intro and ad breaks. Trim anything clippers should never use, so it is not there to clip.
• Name files clearly. "EP42 Founder Interview Full" beats "final_v3_export". When you add episodes, clippers need to know which is new.
• Split very long episodes. A three-hour stream is easier to work with as three one-hour segments.

Then upload them to the campaign page, where clippers download them. See raw cuts for Clipping campaigns for how clippers use them.

Step 4: Set the rate and the budget

The rate is what you pay for every 1,000 verified views on the clips. The budget is the most the campaign can spend. Together they decide how many views the campaign can buy.

Maximum views = budget ÷ rate × 1,000

For example (hypothetical numbers), ₹30,000 at ₹25 per 1,000 verified views can buy up to 12,00,000 verified views. If the clips earn fewer, you spend less.

Clippers see the rate before they start, and good editors put their time where the rate is fair for the work. Setting it well is a topic of its own, with tables for what a rate means per hour of editing, in how much to pay clippers per 1,000 views.

Step 5: Choose how many clippers and which follower bands

You can limit how many clippers may join and which follower bands may join. Both shape the campaign.

A practical starting point is to leave both fairly open on your first campaign. The report will show you which accounts delivered views, and you can tighten on the next one with evidence instead of guesses.

Step 6: Set a cap on what one clipper can earn

Without a cap, one clipper with a viral clip can take a large share of the budget. That is not always bad, since you got the views, but a podcast usually wants many voices clipping many moments, not one big hit.

A cap on what any one clipper can earn spreads the budget. Say you cap each clipper at ₹6,000 on a ₹30,000 budget. At least five clippers will share it, and when the top clipper reaches the cap, the rest of the budget stays open to others. Pick a cap generous enough that a clipper who makes three or four good clips is well paid, and tight enough that no single page can take the whole budget.

Step 7: Go live, then let the campaign run

Launch the campaign. Clippers find it, download the raw cuts, edit, post from their own Instagram accounts and submit the links. Each reel is checked against your brief, and the views on it are verified before they count.

Then leave it alone for the first week. Reels often take a few days to reach people beyond the poster's followers, and views count for 30 days after posting or until the campaign ends, so early numbers are an incomplete picture. Spend the week replying to comments on clips that tag your show. It helps them travel.

The campaign stops by itself when the budget is spent and at its end date. You do not have to watch it to avoid overspending.

Step 8: Read the report and download the CSV

The campaign report on your dashboard lists every reel with its verified views. Download it as a CSV and sort it by views. See campaign reports for every column. Look for four things.

1. The top performing clips. Watch the top ten. What do the first three seconds have in common?
2. The moments that won. Several clips of the same moment doing well tells you which part of the episode truly landed. That is the moment your next episode's title and thumbnail should promise.
3. The accounts that delivered. A few clip pages will carry far more views than others. They know your audience. Make sure the next campaign is open to them.
4. The languages and angles. If Hindi captions on your English show outperform, you have found a new audience.

Step 9: Feed what you learned back into the show

The report is research you paid for in views, so use it beyond clipping.

• Titles and thumbnails. Lead the next episode's title with the kind of moment that won.
• Guest choice. If one guest's clips beat the rest by a wide margin, invite more guests like them.
• Your own channel. The moments that did best for clippers are the moments to cut for your own page too.
• Sponsors. A report of clips and verified views is the evidence sponsors want. How clips help podcasters land sponsors and brand deals shows how to put it in a pitch.

Step 10: Refresh the raw cuts every episode

A clipping campaign is a rhythm, not a one-off. Clippers come back to shows that give them fresh footage.

You can add new raw cuts to a live campaign, so a weekly show can keep one campaign fed, or run one campaign per episode or per batch of episodes if you prefer a clean report for each.

How Viewzar runs your podcast clipping campaign

Viewzar is a pay-per-view creator marketplace for India, built for Instagram Reels and rupees. A Clipping campaign is one of its two campaign types, made for podcasters, YouTubers and shows.

You list your clipping campaign on Viewzar by signing up as a brand. Then you write the brief, upload raw cuts to the campaign page, and set a rate per 1,000 verified views (at least ₹10) and a budget (at least ₹10,000). You choose how many clippers may join, which follower bands may join, and the cap on what any one clipper can earn. Creating a campaign walks through the form.

Clippers and video editors download your raw cuts, edit their own 30 to 60 second reels, post them from their own Instagram accounts and submit the links. Many of them can cut the same episode into many different clips on many accounts at once, including clip pages, regional pages and faceless pages. Several genuinely different edits are welcome, and re-posting a raw cut unedited is not. Viewzar checks each reel against your brief.

Views are read through the official Instagram API, together with likes, comments, shares and saves, checked for fraud automatically and reviewed by hand when needed. A reel needs 1,000 verified views to qualify, and then every view counts. You pay only for verified views, up to your budget, with no hiring, no negotiation and no paying per edit. The 2% fee comes out of clipper payouts, never on top of your rate. The campaign stops by itself when the budget is spent and at its end date, and every reel and its verified views appear in the report on your dashboard, downloadable as a CSV.

It suits shows with video episodes and a clear topic that want reach across many accounts. It is not built for one named editor on a retainer, and it covers Instagram Reels only.

Mistakes podcasters make on their first clipping campaign

1. Uploading a heavily edited episode with music beds and lower thirds. Clippers need clean footage to cut from. Give them the cleaner master.
2. A brief with no credit line. Clips that do not name the show cannot send anyone back to it.
3. Listing exact moments to clip. You get the same clip thirty times. List moments to avoid instead.
4. No cap per clipper on a small budget. One page takes most of it and you lose the spread.
5. Judging in three days. Views keep arriving for weeks. Read the report at the end of the tracking window.
6. Letting the raw cuts go stale. A campaign with last month's episode only gets last month's energy.

The bottom line

A podcast clipping campaign is a brief, raw cuts, a rate, a budget and a few caps, and none of it takes long to set up. What makes it work is an exact credit line, clean footage, a fair rate and the habit of reading the report and feeding each new episode in. If you want many clippers cutting every episode on many accounts while you pay only for verified views, Viewzar's Clipping campaigns are built for exactly that. To see the work from the other side, how to make money clipping explains what clippers look for in a campaign.