Paid Armies of ‘Clippers’ Boost Internet Stars Like MrBeast (2)

It’s hard to imagine that MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber, needs help getting and keeping fans.

But behind the scenes, Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, employs the equivalent of a vast call center — more than a thousand “clippers” who put short versions of his stunt and challenge videos in front of online audiences and steer them to his YouTube channel, which boasts 448 million subscribers.

For a recent campaign, Donaldson’s team paid independent editors employed by a startup, called Clipping, $50 for every 100,000 views that snippets of his YouTube shows got on social media apps, according to a post on ...