How to Choose a Clipping Agency: 10 Questions to Ask Before You Sign

A clipping agency takes your long-form content, cuts it into short-form clips, and, if it is any good, posts and distributes them for you and tells you what worked. The market is full of teams who do the first part and none of the rest, and the price lists make them look identical. They are not.

These ten questions will tell you which kind of agency you are talking to. We answer them ourselves at the end.

1. How many clips per episode, and who chooses them?

This is the most important question and most agencies answer it badly. "As many as you need" is not an answer. A good team will tell you a range, typically fifty to a hundred from an hour, and will explain how moments are logged and who decides which ones get cut.

What you are really asking is whether you are buying editing or buying judgement. The editing is table stakes. The judgement, knowing which moment carries a post and where the hook is, is the thing that grows a show. See bulk clipping, explained for what the process should look like.

2. Can I see clips from a show like mine?

Not a showreel. Clips, with the accounts they were posted to and the numbers they did. A team that has worked with interview shows will have interview clips. If every example is a different format from yours, they are learning on you.

3. Who writes the hooks and captions?

Captions and the first-second hook decide whether a clip gets watched. If the answer is "the editor does them" without any mention of a process or testing, expect generic captions. If the answer is a system for writing, testing, and reusing what works, you are talking to the right people.

4. Do you post, or just deliver?

Many agencies deliver a folder and leave the posting to you. That leaves you with the hard part: a daily cadence, captions per platform, scheduling across accounts, and replies. If you have a team for that, delivery-only can work. If you do not, the clips will sit in the folder.

The best teams post, on a planned cadence, across your accounts, and treat the posting as part of the product.

5. Do you run multiple accounts, and who owns them?

Reach in 2026 comes from networks of accounts, not from one. Ask whether the agency sets up and runs them, and then ask who owns them. The only acceptable answer is that you do: your handles, your logins, your followers. Any team that keeps ownership of accounts it built for you has built itself a lever.

6. What does reporting look like, and how often?

Ask to see a real report. A monthly PDF of vanity numbers is the floor. A weekly read of which moments, hooks, and accounts pulled, with a view of what will change next week, is what you want. If the report does not lead to decisions, it is decoration.

7. What is the turnaround?

From episode delivered to first clips posted. For a weekly show, clips from the new episode should be going out within a day or two of release, with the rest of the week filled from the back catalogue. Longer than that and the clips are promoting an episode that has already aged.

8. How is pricing structured?

The honest structure is a monthly package scoped by two numbers, clips per month and accounts in the network, with the price stated in full before you sign. Per-clip pricing with no view of the monthly total makes volume expensive and encourages the agency to cut fewer. Retainers that do not specify output are a way of not promising anything.

9. What happens if we stop?

Ask where the files, the accounts, and the reporting go at the end of an engagement. The right answer is that they are yours and always were. Ask it early, because the teams that have a good answer will not mind, and the ones that do not will show you something.

10. Where is the team, and how do we communicate?

Time zones are a feature if the team is set up for them. A clipping team in India working with a show in the United States can take an episode at the end of the US day and have clips ready by the US morning. What matters is a named point of contact, a response time you can rely on, and a working rhythm that fits your release schedule.

Red flags

• Pricing per clip with no monthly scope.
• Account ownership that is unclear or retained by the agency.
• A showreel but no posted clips with numbers.
• "Unlimited" anything.
• Reporting that is monthly, late, or absent.
• No answer to "who chooses the moments".

Green flags

• A clear clips-per-episode range and a described process for choosing.
• Posting and account management included, with your ownership in writing.
• Weekly reads that lead to changes.
• A scope and price stated in full in the proposal.
• Examples from shows like yours, with numbers.

How we answer these

For the record, since we are a clipping agency and you should hold us to the same standard:

Fifty to a hundred clips per hour-long episode, logged by our agents and chosen by editors. Hooks and captions are written per clip and tested against performance. We post, on a planned cadence, across a network of accounts we set up and that you own. Reporting is continuous and read weekly with you. Turnaround from release to first clips is a day or two. Pricing is a monthly package scoped by clips and accounts, stated in full in the proposal. If you stop, everything stays with you. The team is in Gurugram, India, with a named point of contact, working with shows and brands mainly in the United States and Europe.

Details are on our clipping agency page, and the first conversation costs nothing.