Most clips that go nowhere were edited perfectly well. The captions were right, the crop followed the speaker, the length was correct - and the moment was never worth watching in the first place. Editing is the part you can learn in a week. Choosing is the part that decides whether anybody stays, and it happens before you cut anything.
Four things. One is usually enough, two is rare, and none is the most common outcome by a distance.
Not a fact, an opinion with an edge on it. "We fired our best salesperson" is a clip. "Hiring is important" is not, and no amount of editing will make it one. If nobody could disagree, nobody has a reason to watch to the end or to say anything underneath.
Something happened, then something changed. The turn is the clip and the build-up is not, which is why a good clip usually starts a sentence or two later than the speaker did. If you cannot find where it turns, there is no clip in that stretch.
A figure people did not expect stops a scroll on its own: a price, a count, a length of time, a loss. It has to be surprising rather than merely large, and it has to be said out loud in the clip rather than added as text afterwards.
Laughing, wincing, going quiet, hands up. Most short video is watched without sound, so a moment that is only good because of how it is said leaves nothing on screen. Something visible has to happen, even if it is just a face changing.
Four kinds of recording, and they do not yield the same thing.
Two of these have a page of their own on how to work through them: podcasts and streams.
These are not weak clips. They are clips that cannot work, and recognising them saves the week you would spend editing them.
Anything that needs context. If a clip has to be explained before it makes sense, the explanation is the clip's first ten seconds and nobody is still there. The same goes for in-jokes, running references and anything that is only funny if you watched the last one.
Anything that is only good because of who said it. A famous person saying something ordinary travels on their name, and you do not have their name. Somebody unknown saying something extraordinary travels on the thing itself, which is the only asset a clipper actually controls.
And anything that starts with a warm-up: a greeting, a re-introduction, a summary of what is coming. The first seconds is about that opening specifically, and here is why a good clip still sometimes fails.
Fewer than it looks like. An hour of conversation usually holds a handful of moments that stand on their own, and a recording that yields twenty is either exceptional or being cut too generously. Posting the weak ones does not cost you nothing - it teaches the platform what your account is.
The topic decides who might watch, the moment decides whether they stay. A narrow subject with a real turn in it beats a broad subject with none, which is why generic advice clips do so badly: the audience is enormous and the reason to watch is missing.
Clipping a moment that has been clipped fifty times puts you in a comparison you cannot win, and duplicate submissions are voided by most campaigns anyway. The usable version of the idea is to clip the same recording everybody else is clipping and choose a different moment out of it.
It can find the candidates, which is most of the tedium: the places where the energy changes, where a claim is made, where a story turns. Which of those is right for your audience is still a judgement, and it stays yours. What a tool removes is scrubbing through two hours to find the ten places worth looking at.
Paste a link, get the candidates back as finished clips. No card required.