John Kosner Spoke with Matthew Frank of The Ankler About Netflix Enabling Video Clip Sharing
Original Article: The Ankler, by Matthew Frank, January 15th, 2025
Trung Phan, a newsletter writer with an AI startup, can do a better job marketing Hollywood product online than studios. On X, where he posts memes, business analyses, and stories about the making of movies and TV shows (among other topics), Phan has more than 705,000 followers. In the last 10 days of December alone, he had three entertainment-related posts rack up more than two million views. One shared how Lindsay Lohan’s Irish Wish on Netflix epitomizes how movies are being designed for streaming; another riffed on the Home Alone house being for sale for $5.3 million; and the third, tellingly, broke down the power of Timothée Chalamet appearing on Theo Von’s podcast during his A Complete Unknown press tour.
Dubbing the moment “a great encapsulation of the media landscape,” Phan laid out how Chalamet scored exponentially more attention and pickup for the Von appearance than he did Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Why? Phan concluded: “Spontaneous, permissionless, and no gatekeepers.”
Phan’s own success can be chalked up to those same principles, the opposite of how any digital content gets made at an entertainment company: rounds of edits from internal and external stakeholders that water down what was originally interesting about it. It’s gatekeepers and begging for permission all the way down.
“In the vicious fight for attention, they’re losing,” Phan says of Hollywood. Consider the data: Netflix boasts an impressive “two hours of viewing per member per day,” according to co-CEO Ted Sarandos on the company’s last earnings call, but YouTube bests it month after month on living-room viewing alone according to the Nielsen Gauge. TikTok users spend an average of 2.48 hours per day on the app. Instagrammers: 2.46 hours daily.
The numbers are even more stark when you focus on younger audiences. Gen Z-ers watch three hours of video content on YouTube and TikTok every day while spending just more than an hour on streaming and traditional media platforms. The 13-24 demographic spends just 32 percent of its media time watching TV and movies, compared with 59 percent for those over 35.
The cruelest irony? Much of that time spent is... people trading, remixing, and communicating via Hollywood content. Over the last two years, the industry has seen user-generated initiatives turn Minions: The Rise of Gru (#Gentleminions), Barbie and Oppenheimer (#Barbenheimer), Suits, and Bridgerton into phenomena. Yet Hollywood's takeaway seems to be either, “Let’s hope that happens again!” or “Let’s awkwardly try to engineer our own!” (Witness the recent #Glicked trend that wasn’t.)
As Phan tells us, “Nothing top-down ever works in the internet age. People sniff up.” Or as Loren Schwartz, a longtime marketing executive who most recently served as CMO of Sony Entertainment’s streaming and TV division, says, “If it feels like advertising, it’s going to fail.”
Social media may dominate the culture, but Hollywood still speaks social like a foreigner rather than a native.
We talked to about a dozen experts — veterans of Netflix and Sony as well social media and Gen Z marketers — to decipher what the entertainment industry is and isn’t doing right right now and how to compete.
You’ll learn about:
Why recent “social” launches from Netflix and Tubi were dead on arrival
How A24 recently nailed meme culture
The bot armies employed by studio marketing teams
The one thing a Gen Z marketer believes is holding Hollywood back
The Hollywood professions dubbed “archaic” in their understanding of the internet
What entertainment marketers can learn from Joe Rogan’s pod strategy
One particularly controversial social subculture worth your time
How the internet’s “clip channels” profit from Hollywood.
You Don’t Get To Decide
Last month, one of the innumerable microtrends gathering steam across TikTok (and getting recirculated and shared on Instagram and X) featured a Family Guy clip referencing a notorious celebrity and then real-world footage of that person, all over the song “All 10” by rapper Younginsosleaze.
Besides this Kobe Bryant one, there are versions featuring O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, and Diddy. Collectively, these four posts, all of which went viral on TikTok and X, racked up 14 million views. (There are, no joke, thousands of these edits.) Even for the delightfully edgy Family Guy, one has trouble imagining Fox’s marketing department or Hulu’s social media team cooking up a Diddy mashup at this moment. (Family Guy episodes stream on Hulu and ranked ninth on Nielsen’s latest streaming TV chart.) Representatives from Fox and Hulu did not respond to our requests for comment.
When you hand consumers the reins of content creation, you may end up with more attention but also far more questionable usages. “Culture is going to take it the way they want to,” says Myles Worthington, an award-winning social marketer who was Netflix’s head of global audiences, brand and editorial marketing before starting his own agency Worthi.
So what do you do in this instance? “Whether you're an agency or in-house at the studio trying to course correct, you can only do so much,” advises Worthington, who's done work for Amazon, Hulu, Lionsgate, Max, and Peacock at Worthi. “It's going to be the community that tells you, ‘This is how I want to talk about this. This is how I want to share it.’ You can try to change it . . . But the best thing is to be like, ‘Alright, this isn't damaging to it. How do we jump on that train?’”
Worthington has a theory that the bottleneck for the industry is the ecosystem that surrounds the talent involved in a project. “You have your agents, you have your publicist — everybody has an opinion on how their talent should look and feel and be perceived in the world, and nine times out of 10, their team is a little more sensitive than the actual talent themselves,” he says. “For archaic institutions — like agents, like some publicists — it behooves them to understand the value of social.”
We asked a veteran PR exec how studios and agencies can adapt to a world where users grab pieces of their material (or that of their clients) and turn it into content that they otherwise wouldn’t approve of and put out themselves. They pushed back on the idea that marketing doesn’t influence the digital discourse. “There’s still messaging that’s said by PR, by marketing, by social media teams that tends to drive pieces of the culture and the conversation on social that in some way control what may or may not happen with user-generated content.”
A Dead Horse Brought to Life
It was the carousel horse that ran away with the internet’s heart. This film still captures a joyful moment in A24’s romantic tearjerker We Live in Time. But as happy and in love as Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield look in that moment, no one is more giddy than that horse, which appears to be photobombing their bliss.
Within hours of FilmCrave’s post, memelords were off to the races, putting the horse in The Shining, Zendaya’s mirrored sunglasses in the Challengers poster, Seabiscuit, Seinfeld, and more. “It had celebrities in it, but then it was kind of vague,” notes Rachel Karten, a social media consultant and the writer of Link in Bio, a newsletter for social media professionals, explaining why the image quickly caught fire. “You could put your own sort of spin on it, in a way that the internet just loves to do.”
While Karten theorizes that A24 didn’t anticipate how the meme would become part of the weepy film’s marketing, she applauds the way the studio responded. “Any good company knows that when the internet takes over and it blows up, you have an opportunity either to ride that wave or try and swim against the current,” she says. “I would never recommend swimming against the current if it’s not something that’s brand-damaging, which in this case, I don’t think it was. People were having fun with it. They didn’t really know what the movie was about yet. It wasn’t like they’re making some commentary about the movie.” (A24 was unable to fulfill our request for an interview.)
Neither A24 nor anyone involved with the film tried to squelch it, nor did they hop on the bandwagon too early. Only as they started to promote the film at fall festivals and in the run-up to its mid-October release did they acknowledge and embrace the meme, even releasing a T-shirt “for the carousel horse girls.”
As Karten explains, “They were like, what’s our very intentional way that we can wink at what’s happening online? We see you, but we’re not going to pivot our whole social strategy to be this horse.”
By being patient and ultimately in on the joke — remember, this is a sad relationship movie that had been hijacked by a deranged-looking merry-go-round beast — We Live in Time stood out amid the deluge of fall prestige pics, earning an impressive $31.5 million in global box office.
How to Engineer Virality — But Maybe Get Roasted Trying
A24 may be the most social-savvy studio, but Karten doesn’t believe A24 intentionally put the horse out there in the hopes that it’d break free. But she had to think about it!
But how would a studio get stuff out there? Is it possible to be proactive? Or are you perpetually on guard, hoping for kismet?
“Just make these things available and hope you kind of serve them on a dish and say, ‘Hey, look,’” says Loren Schwartz, the veteran marketing exec and Sony alum. “Then hopefully it goes somewhere.”
Okay, but really, let’s say you wanted to do a little more than just hope. “We had not just the internal team, but teams of writers, teams of people who loved the brand, loved the shows,” says Maya Watson, who worked at Netflix from 2015–2021 as director of marketing, editorial & publishing and is now CEO of a social app called why?!. “We would let them watch the content and then say, ‘What were your favorite moments?’ trying to anticipate it and build that stuff in advance.” Her team would also “listen for people who have fan channels,” she adds, connecting with them to “celebrate them for what they were doing” and ask, “How can we help you?”
Of course, as Schwartz tells us, there are other ways to try to get the discussion rolling. “Marketing departments do this all the time: They have probably 1,000 or 2,000 fake names out there that they use to help promote,” he says, and when pressed, immediately acknowledges that this is inherently risky. “You’ve got to be careful,” he says. “If they find out, then it becomes a little mud in the face. But the goal is, how do you start an organic conversation?”
The veteran PR exec we interviewed also recommended trying to regain control of the narrative by commanding scores of organic-seeming accounts. “In one to three to five years, do I think there will be a couple hundred or even 1,000 people given something by a studio, network or platform — whether it’s merch or something else — in exchange for posting about stuff? Probably.”
If it takes a studio-modified organism to kickstart that virality, well, so be it.
Trying — and Failing — to Meet the Moments
As Schwartz’s comments suggest, studios and streamers are willing to get rather creative when it comes to sparking conversation. So the initial news in October that Netflix would launch a feature called Moments to “share your favorite Netflix scenes” seemed like an acknowledgment that Hollywood was taking a new approach to the meme-ification of its content.
Could Moments turbocharge viewership of Netflix’s growing roster of live events? We imagined watching one of its roasts or the just-launched WWE Raw — wrestling is immensely, scarily popular on social — and clipping a moment to blast out to friends via our social accounts.
Then we opened the Netflix app and tried Moments.
The tool is not currently available to use during live events and it’s frankly nothing more than a glorified time-stamp bookmarking feature. You select a time in a video that you want to save and you can then send a link to that Moment to another subscriber.
There’s no ability to create a clip, nor any opportunity to do something creative with the Moment. You can share it, but the person who receives it will have to be a subscriber and logged in to view it. There is no evidence fans are using the tool: A search on X for “Netflix moments” came up entirely blank. (A Netflix spokesperson tells us that the company has seen users start to deploy Moments but declined to share any specific data.)
We asked Worthington and Watson, the Netflix alums, about Moments, and they confirmed that an idea for something Moments-like (but good) has been on the whiteboard for a while. “We had always talked about, how do we make it easier for people to share the memes, the screenshots? Because they’re happening, we want people to feel like they have the ability to share that content, and it’ll only benefit us,” says Worthington, who spent five years at Netflix, leaving in April 2022.
“There are challenges, right? There’s licensing, there’s filmmakers and showrunner sensitivities... So it was at that point [those ideas became] a ‘No, not going to happen,’” adds Worthington.
Watson explains: “From a technical standpoint, there were a lot of things that had to be figured out in order to make that happen.” (The Netflix spokesperson says the company plans to expand the feature.)
Then in late November, Tubi launched its own in-app social feature called Scenes. It, too, is not the social unshackling of its 250,000 pieces of content for its fans, but rather a TikTok-style feed of short clips from the platform’s shows and movies that viewers can swipe through to find something to watch. A Tubi spokesperson emphasized that Scenes is still in its early days but says the data has been positive and the company is exploring the ability to let users share clips and images and even modify them. (Three years ago, Netflix tried — and eventually gave up on — a similar feature called Fast Laughs. Undaunted, in January, Peacock started testing short video clips and games in its app to boost user engagement.)
None of this meets consumers where they are — yet. “The execution does matter, and I’m not positive that sending digital bookmarks around is necessarily going to be the breakthrough that Netflix could achieve if it could actually enable its fans to share clips directly,” says John Kosner, a former ESPN digital media executive who now runs his own consultancy, Kosner Media, who’s seen how sports leagues, teams, and players have benefited from fans editing and sharing dramatic plays.
“You have to be willing to give the people who are best at what they do the keys, the ability to have full creative control and freedom and to express their opinion,” says Connor Blakely, CEO of the Nashville-based Gen Z marketing agency YouthLogic. “Hollywood will never win for that reason, because in any creative process, control is probably the biggest thing that blocks the highest and best outcome of what you’re seeking out to create.”
His recommendation for Netflix? Give every person using Moments a “specific code or call to action” so that when they share clips on social, they can get an affiliate bonus for every new member their work signs up.
“That’d be quite an innovative thing, and a large driver for next-gen content consumers,” he says, especially for long-form content, “to come across various shows. It would also be able to revive some old shows, kind of like what you saw happen to Suits.”
Suits and the Nebulous World of Online Clip Culture
Many factors contributed to Suits’ dominance on the Netflix charts in 2023, but one oft-overlooked element was internet clip channels — social media accounts that post minute-plus segments from movies or TV shows. Even series creator Aaron Korsh knew it. “About a month before [Suits] showed up on Netflix, I started hearing from many people saying that their teenage son or daughter saw the interview scene with Mike and Harvey on TikTok and started watching the series — and now all their friends are addicted to it,” Korsh told the New York Post last year.
Clip channels are “a successful side hustle,” says Ryan, who runs the digital accounts Side Hustle Review where he’s covered this phenomenon. (Ryan doesn’t share his last name, because some of the side hustle hucksters he exposes have threatened to get him banned from Instagram.) “It’s even a profitable full-time [job] for some that really figured it out... Over the last two years, it’s grown so much.”
The “creators” running these channels may be breaking the law, but they are often really good editors. They can cut video that’ll grab a viewer in the first five seconds — whether it’s a tense piece of dialogue, recognizable IP, or an attractive lead. They’ll end on a cliffhanger to lure viewers into seeking out the next video, clicking on their channel — and draw them to engage via the comments.
Once these channels get some traction — as few as 1,000 subscribers on YouTube — they earn a share of the revenue from the ads that run between their videos.
“Your goal is to spool up really quickly and get tons of views,” says Ryan. “Typically copyrighted material or videos with known actors get great attention, so you can build up your channel fairly quickly.”
Hollywood’s usual impulse when faced with this kind of unauthorized use of its IP is to seek to shut it down. But Ryan and others we spoke with believe that’d be short-sighted and that there’s another way to engage.
Co-Opting the Clippers
While movie and TV titles — from Law & Order: SVU all the way down to Hot Frosty — are a hot commodity in the clipping world, it’s far from the only prevalent one. Podcasts, particularly video ones, routinely get clipped and blasted onto social media, Ryan says.
The key difference between movies/TV and podcasts: The podcasters don’t even try to get the clips removed.
“Joe Rogan is a huge target. People clip him all the time, and I think he kind of gets it,” Ryan says. “It just gets him more exposure to people [who would] potentially listen to him full-time... He doesn’t really do any work to stop it.”
Although Hollywood would not profit directly from these channels, Ryan believes they could be additive for the industry. In theory, people are watching what is essentially a minute-long promo for a show or movie. Right now, if they’re going to check out the whole thing, it’s likely diced up minute by minute.
“Sometimes I think a show is interesting, and I just wait for it to show up in my For You page,” YouthLogic’s Blakely says. “Law & Order, I’ll go watch three or four [clips], and I’m like, ‘Oh, that was a cool little story.’” But right now at least, he admits, “I’m never gonna go watch a full episode of that.”
Both Ryan and Blakely believe that studios should incentivize “creators” with funds to encourage clipping, which could then give rights holders more opportunity to influence what the next Suits is. “Gamify user-generated content and clipping culture,” Blakely says, creating natural prompts that drive people to where they can watch the full content. In a way, it’s the 2025 version of how Apple and Spotify worked with the music companies to make paying for music easier than stealing it.
The alternative is less pretty. On TikTok Live, the popular video app’s real-time broadcasting feature, you’ll often find “TikTok Watch Parties,” where users screen-record particularly engaging movies and livestream them to their audiences. (Of course, TikTok may be banned in the U.S. on Sunday due to fears over the Chinese government accessing Americans’ data, but both YouTube and Twitch also have a rich history of similar livestream watch parties.)
Most of the time, they’re old movies like Zombieland or Final Destination. Other times, though, they’re current releases such as The Substance. In one instance, at least 5,400 users watched an illicit “screening” of Mubi’s body horror flick on October 3. At the time, it was only available in theaters.
Once you give the reins of social marketing over to consumers, you end up with usages you might not like: full movies, very dirty or dark jokes — and perhaps you’re reinforcing the habit among younger audiences of watching exclusively short-form content.
Movies and TV shows aren’t meant to be consumed in minute-long chunks, but adapting to “next-gen consumers,” as Blakely calls them, will mean taking some pretty significant risks, like, perhaps, encouraging people on those very platforms to spotlight your titles. The alternative — standing pat and hoping younger consumers will eventually worm their way over to you — isn’t an option.
