Crypto and fintech brands are moving marketing budgets away from paid influencer campaigns and toward short-form clipping networks and fan-made content, as executives say the old influencer model is producing weaker results.
Rhys McKay said in an interview, "In 2025, we spent $30,000 on an influencer to promote an exchange and ended up getting just one registered user." He said the creator was globally known, but the campaign converted only one person.
McKay said that result would have been hard to imagine a few years earlier. Before launching short-video clipping agency Lumina Clippers, he spent five years running a crypto marketing company and put a cumulative $30 million into influencer marketing. He said brands once paid $40,000 for a single tweet, and in 2021 through 2022, promotions for tokens or exchanges generally delivered positive conversions and return on investment. After 2025, he said, that model stopped working.
Budgets are shifting to lower-cost formats
McKay's experience is now being seen across the sector. The report says crypto and fintech brands are cutting paid influencer budgets and redirecting spending to two cheaper channels.
- One is clipping distribution, where large numbers of freelance creators edit and publish short videos.
- The other is fan-made secondary creation, where supporters produce brand-related videos at no cost to the company.
The cost gap is central to that shift. Traditional paid media buys usually cost about $20 to $80 per thousand views. Clipping distribution, by contrast, costs roughly $1 to $5 CPM.
McKay said audience fatigue has become a major problem. Some influencers have worked with more than 100 brands, he said, so by the time a new client shows up as number 101, viewers are already tired of the format. Repeated commercial promotions have also drained trust, making it harder for influencers to push audiences toward investment activity or product use.
James Sixsmith, chief executive of futures trading platform Take Profit Trader, said influencer spending is difficult to control. His company has decided to pull that work back in-house, reduce outside influencer partnerships, and internalize marketing that had previously been outsourced.
Short-form clipping networks are scaling up
McKay said Lumina Clippers now works with 62,000 vetted clipping creators and 5,000 user-generated content producers. The company takes long-form video, cuts it into large volumes of short clips, and distributes them across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts.
Creators are paid based on views, with compensation on any single video capped at 100,000 views. McKay said that structure is designed to keep one clip from consuming too much of a campaign budget.
Daniel Bitton, who runs a similar clipping platform, said the average CPM on his platform is about $1, versus $40 to $80 for standard paid ads. For companies, he said, the choice is straightforward. In his words, the business is essentially building a marketplace for viral content distribution.
McKay also argued that short-form content lasts longer than a standard ad buy. Once a conventional campaign stops spending, new views usually stop as well. A clipped short video can stay in circulation, he said, with users still discovering the same post two years later.
The model is no longer limited to crypto. Clients mentioned in the report include OKX, Adobe, Algorand, Netflix, and prediction market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi.
That volume also creates room for low-quality output. McKay said strict screening matters because some open platforms allow nearly anyone to register, and some users even pay others to register accounts for them. Once identity checks are completed, they can begin uploading short videos. Lumina Clippers, he said, sets application thresholds, reviews account quality, and analyzes video performance data.
Fan edits are being treated as higher-value content
Paid distribution is one route. A second route is effectively free. Zaid Attari, who previously handled marketing for NFT brand Pudgy Penguins, said the most valuable material comes from unpaid fan-made edits.
In a voice memo, Attari said viewers understand that paid short-form clips are created for compensation, while fan-made edits come from a different impulse. He described them as passion-driven creative marketing. A strong fan edit can encourage more supporters to make similar content, creating a self-sustaining halo around the brand without direct prompting from the company.
He pointed to Pudgy Penguins character Pengu as a case in point. In 2025, the character became part of the viral TikTok meme "Tim Cheese x John Pork." Attari said the brand seeded the market with early edit materials, and the crossover spread generated about 250 million impressions in two weeks. He said that was direct evidence that fan edits can create substantial value for IP brands and technology companies.
Pudgy Penguins has not abandoned paid marketing altogether. During the 2025 holiday period, the brand spent nearly $500,000 on advertising on the Las Vegas Sphere, according to the report.
Matt, founder of social app Lockit, said on the podcast On The Margin that audiences care about the video itself, not awkward product placement. That, he said, is why native content tends to work better than hard-sell advertising.
Attribution and compliance remain open problems
McKay said clipping campaigns work well for awareness, but direct conversion remains difficult to measure. Brands can see views and shares rise, yet still struggle to determine how many real users or trade orders came from that activity.
Disclosure is another risk. The report says short videos and fan edits that do not clearly state they are paid promotions resemble the same type of conduct that led the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to fine Kim Kardashian $1.26 million. Prediction market platforms including Polymarket and Kalshi have also drawn regulatory attention over marketing campaigns that blur the line between paid promotion and native content.
Even so, McKay said he remains optimistic about the format. "I think if you want stable traffic in 2026, short-form video is the route you have to take," he said. "If you want sustained visibility, you can't do it without short-video distribution."