For years, Emrah Bayraktar did just about anything he could to make money: Cleaned cars. Worked a night-shift in a warehouse. Made sandwiches at a Subway during the day.

When he wasn’t eking out a living with part-time work, 25-year-old Bayraktar from Antwerp, Belgium would take out his iPhone and edit long interviews of influencers into snippets and post them to Instagram. Pop star-turned-Arizona State University professor will.i.am teaches “The Agentic Self” at his headquarters in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 14, 2026.

“And then one random night, I saw a notification saying that I earned $12, I was like OK cool,” Bayraktar said. “Then two weeks later, I made two-and-a-half thousand dollars, and I thought, ‘Maybe I could just quit my jobs and go all-in on this.’”

And he did, earning a cut every time someone bought something from a link he placed in the video clip.

He became so skilled at editing the short videos that he now runs a network of 40,000 freelance clippers and has a YouTube channel where he teaches people how to become clippers, directing them to websites where, instead of getting paid for so-called affiliate link purchases, clippers are paid per view they generate.