Overview

Barstool wasn’t short on content — they were drowning in it. Between podcasts, studio shows, creator rants, and unfiltered IG Stories, there were hundreds of viral-ready moments every week… and almost none were being clipped, distributed, or retargeted on time.

They didn’t need new content — they needed a system that turned chaos into monetizable output.

Approach

We were brought in to build The Clip Engine — a framework that mapped every Barstool creator show, social post, and podcast episode into a centralized clip-scraping and redistribution pipeline.

First, we implemented a tagging protocol at the producer level — training interns, editors, and creators to drop “+” markers at high-laugh, shock, or reaction moments. These markers were fed into a shared Airtable linked to show notes, timestamps, and host commentary.

Next, we built a cross-platform launch grid, where each clip was routed through an approval-light editing system, hit meme formatting, and published within 18–36 hours — often same-day for TikTok/X.

Speed-to-publish improved 5.2× in the first three weeks — down to ~6 hours from episode to platform post.

Each clip was automatically categorized into format buckets:

• Meme-reaction (for X/Twitter)
• Story-driven cutdowns (for Shorts)
• Loud-face/high-contrast edits (for TikTok Reels)
  All tracked inside a Notion dashboard that measured reaction, replay rate, and repost velocity.

Average creator clip volume tripled — with no additional team hires.

This engine let Barstool finally act like the media empire it already was — reactive, smart, and everywhere at once.