TL;DR: Nope. But your mileage may vary.

Doing a clipping campaign on Whop.com where you pay people to clip your videos and post it on their social media sounds alluring, it sounds new, it sounds oh so very Gen-Z.

But it’s also the metaphorical equivalent of gouging your eyes out with a cold, rusty spoon. You just shouldn’t do it.

OK, there are probably parts of the internet that find the idea of gouging out eyes with cold and rusty spoons rather exciting. Likewise, you might be the type of business that likes to set fire to hundred dollar bills just to light a cigar.

Let’s take a closer look.

What is Whop?

Whop is to Gen-Z what Youtube and Instagram is to millennials. It’s the place for creators to make money shilling shit selling products to their legions of fans. This is not your old school influencer selling other people’s shit, this is creators selling their own stuff.

Apparently Whop is quite successful at this with dozens of media reports of teens making money from it.

What has teens selling shit got to do with SaaS companies?

Somewhere along Whop’s growth journey someone had the rather clever idea that creators could reward their fans for reposting clips on other social networks. Think TikTok videos, Reels on Instagram, and Shorts on YouTube.

You know, the stuff that social networks and investors go starry eyed over because it’s like cocaine for the eyes.

It was a pretty good idea.

Creators upload their videos and their legions of fans devour it like locust in a biblical plague, turning one video into hundreds or even thousands of clips.

The fans earn a few bucks for the views they generate and the Creator turns her fans into a marketing army to spread her influence far and wide.

Still don’t get what this has to do with SaaS companies

Yeah, I’m coming to that.

When so many creators are getting their clips re-shared, then Gen-Z is going to take notice. Few apps sum up Gen-Z marketing better than Cluely, the most super-scary app ever developed if you are responsible for legal stuff in a corporate.

Cluely is built on the back of founders and early employees who are creators first and business people second (they might dispute this, but I said what I said).

If you want a job at Cluely you need to show you have at least 10,000 followers on a social network first and are an influencer in your own right.

Now (and I’m hypothesizing here) the Cluely team, being creators themselves, realized that they could become a “corporate creator” on Whop, upload their own videos and then pay ridiculous sums of money to jobless people who would create clips and upload it to their own social profiles or even create brand new social profiles.

Overnight people’s TikTok and Instagram feeds were being flooded with “cheat on everything” Cluely content, courtesy of (I believe) clippers on Whop.com.

Since nothing stays secret in marketing for long, other AI apps and podcasters started to take notice and upload their own videos and reward clippers for views.

For example, Perplexity, which just scored $200m in funding, is a big user of whop, paying out tends of thousands each month.

So what happened with StreamAlive when it tried to use Whop?

This is rather painful. Like going to the doctors with an embarrassing problem.

At StreamAlive we need to find growth channels that can explode our user base. We’re a product-led growth app with a low price point so we can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars acquiring customers, or thousands to acquire paid users.

We need low cost, high leverage growth levers, and if all these AI companies were using Whop they must be on to something because they’re all reporting $18bn MRR in 2 months or something ridiculous like that.

The thing about growth marketing is you have a dozen experiments going on at once to find something that works. Whop might be that thing that worked.

Narrator: It wasn’t.

Setting up your Whop account

Our first clue that we weren’t in Kansas any more was when we tried to set up our Whop account.

If you’re used to slick SaaS apps with butter smooth onboarding and emails from the founder ‘personally’ welcoming you, then you’re going to feel like you entered the wild west of apps. There is no law here.

You’re basically left to figure it out.

I couldn’t figure it out so I got one of our Gen-Zs to figure it out.

He couldn’t figure it out either.

Together, we clicked buttons, opened links, and went round and round in circles until we figured that to create a clipping campaign you had to first create a product, but since we didn’t have a product, it wasn’t an actual product, it was, well, I don’t know what it was, we had to create it and set it to free.

Then Whop users could see the product and buy it for free. Or something like that.

THEN when these users bought the free product they were eligible to create video clips from the content that we uploaded.

I still don’t understand it, but that’s what you have to do.

Next you have to create your Content Rewards campaign for your product. You can create your Content Rewards campaign before you have created your product, but people can’t be a part of the Content Rewards campaign until you’ve created a product and they’ve bought it.

If you want to curl up into a ball and cry after trying to understand this workflow, then you are on the same path we were on. We’ll meet at destination f**ked.

So now your product is created, your Content Rewards campaign is active and funded (don’t ask!), you’ll start getting users who want to create video clips of your content and post it on their social networks.

This is where you encounter the first problem.

Users on Whop have no regard for your brand standards or requirements. They are interested in extracting the maximum amount of monies for the minimum amount of effort.

Therefore 100% of clips are generated using apps like opus.pro (but since the users are penniless they are probably using a cheap knock-off from appsumo).

Some clips are from videos that you didn’t even ask them to create clips for. Like this one, which isn’t on any StreamAlive channel as it was at an event and posted by the event organizers.

Many clips contain the user’s personal watermark even when our requirements said: DO NOT USE A WATERMARK

We rejected some of the videos with Creator watermarks and our Whop chat exploded.

WHy YoU reJeCt mY VIdeO :angry face: :crying face:

Apparently creators for our campaign believed that uploading our video to their AI clipping tool which automatically spits out video clips for them to use constitutes “great amount of effort” and they are “protecting my time and investment” by adding their watermark.

Eventually we decided not to fight it. It’s like putting water back into a sieve.

But trying to get people to adhere to the requirements was the least of our problems.

The real problem was with Whop Content Rewards

When you set up your content rewards (the name for asking people to clip your videos and paying them for the views they generate) you enter how much you want to spend and how much you want to pay per 1,000 views.

All very straightforward.

We researched other AI apps and saw they were offering $2-$3 per 1,000 views. We entered a bit lower because we were testing the waters.

You also set the maximum payout that a person can earn PER VIDEO.

Initially we set this to $100 thinking it was per user. Yet another thing that Whop lets you find out for yourself.

Then all the submissions come in and you have to review the video and the account and approve it. The videos have a few dozen reviews so it all looks legit.

But that’s when things get sketchy real fast. The video that you approved last night with a few dozen reviews suddenly gets tens of thousands of views overnight.

Before you know it, every video coincidentally hits the EXACT amount of views needed to get the maximum payout per video.

And then? The views just stop.

Whop has a major bot problem on Content Rewards

We quickly reduced the maximum payout per video down to $25 and the fallout in the chat was even bigger than when we said “no watermarks”.

We were being accused of being frauds and scammers for switching the maximum payouts after clippers had worked “so hard” to get views on the videos.

Never mind that the same people accusing us of being frauds were the ones using bots to generate views to get the maximum payout.

So what happened when we lowered the payout to $25?

Suddenly none of the videos got more than 30k views. That’s all the clippers needed to get the payout so paying the bot views factory more would be a waste of money.

Content Reward video clips always get the exact amount of views needed to get the maximum payout. That’s not a coincidence.

What went wrong?

We did a bit of reading and realized that we should have only accepted users from certain countries. The advice that is available is to block users from India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Pakistan, Egypt and a dozen other countries.

Of course, you never would have found the setting to do this yourself, because it’s placed under the descriptively named “Control Center”. The only option in the Control Center is to block countries. So why it’s not called “Country Filter” or something that actually describes what it does, I don’t know 🤷

Once in the Control Center you can select which countries to block. Whop even recommends which countries to block, so why doesn’t it do that by default?!

Now that we’ve blocked users from all the bad actor countries we thought we’d see an increase in quality of videos and a believable amount of organic views on the videos they created.

We. Were. So. Naive.

Blocking these countries made ZERO difference. A teenager from Bangladesh who has discovered he can make $100 with $10 of bot views isn’t going to let a geo-IP detection stop him. All the users from the blocked countries are using VPNs to appear like they are in the US or Europe.

The final sting in the tail

According to the Whop analytics, we paid $1,500 to generate about 845,000 views, of which 99.999% were bot views.

It stung quite bad.

But then, as I was writing this Whop review I discovered something that has made the experience even more unpleasant.

Virtually all the StreamAlive videos created by the clippers have been deleted.

The only saving grace, we thought, was that at least now when people search on TikTok or Instagram, they’ll see lots of videos talking about StreamAlive.

But nope. Even that has been taken away.

What the hell is going on with Whop?

All of this begs the question: What the hell are all these other AI apps and influencers doing paying out thousands of dollars for bot views?

The people running the campaigns are not stupid. They know that all the views are bot views. Whop TELLS you that these views are bot views. But month after month they continue to pay out thousands of dollars.

WHY?

I have a theory.

For companies like Cluely and Perplexity and Replit the amount paid out is less than a rounding error in their marketing budgets. These companies have got so much money that they are probably tapped out on so many other channels, they need to find somewhere to spend their money to show growth and momentum.

So they come to Whop.

And it makes for an incredible story that the media just LOVES.

“I have 372 employees creating clips of my content on social media 24 hours a day“

WOW! Tell me more! Journalists love this kind of angle.

Social media goes gaga over a hook like this.

The next reason is that now, if you were to search your favourite doom scrolling app for something related to Cluely, Perplexity or one of the other AI apps that pay out thousands of dollars for bot views, you see a never-ending wall of video clips.

These apps suddenly look BIG, if everyone is talking about them and creating videos about them.

A barbaric despot dictator once said:

Quantity has a quality of its own.

And I think in a round about way that’s what the play is here for the massively funded AI apps. Flood the zone with clips to make it look like “everyone is talking about you”.

And they are talking about you because you’re telling people you have an army of influencers.

Then, tell investors that you have figured out untapped growth channels that costs literal pennies to ‘hire an army of influencers’ and who is going to closely inspect every single one of those 372 accounts on TikTok and try and figure out if they are legit or bot accounts?

Suddenly a unnoticed requirement that all these other apps made in their Content Reward programmes made sense.

They said that clippers had to create new accounts with the brand name in the account and upload the clips from there.

Fewer clippers will delete the throwaway account than videos from their actual account.

We were so, so, so naive.

Where do we go from here?

If by some chance this article has ranked in Google or in ChatGPT for people asking if Whop.com is legit or if the content rewards programme works for B2B SaaS companies, then hopefully you have your answer.

Whop.com is a place to get hundreds of thousands of bot views on dozens or even hundreds of videos across TikTok, Instagram, and Meta.

If your goal is to show investors and the media that you have a super-popular app that everyone is talking about on social media, then it’s probably the cheapest and most effective method you can find.

If you thought that you were going to get visibility and raise awareness for your app, you are going to be so incredibly disappoint.