Clip Yield Decay Curve

Clip Yield Decay Curve is the observation that each successive pass over the same long-form asset returns fewer usable clips, and that the marginal clip costs more review time than the one before it. The first pass through a 60-minute webinar might yield 12 publishable vertical cuts; the fourth pass over the same footage yields three, and two of those need a human rewrite of the hook. Agencies that plan retainer volume around raw clip counts hit a wall around week six, when the source library is exhausted and the auto-clipper starts surfacing the same B-roll and the same mid-sentence pauses. The fix is a source cadence, not a tool swap: budget new long-form input per client channel per month, and treat the clipper as a multiplier on fresh footage rather than a recycler of old. ContentFries and Klap both surface topic-level scoring that makes the decay visible before it reaches the client calendar.