Jake Cass founded Empyre to put a license agreement between creator content and the fans who clip it, with a revenue split on what those clips generate. The London-based startup, launched in November 2025, is also his argument that unregulated clipping is a platform enforcement risk most creators are underestimating.

“We saw a big issue with fan clubs everywhere,” Jake says. “Creators are in a position where they’re constantly taking from fans. We just thought we’d flip the whole script and give a platform where fans can actually earn their rewards.” That premise shapes who Empyre is targeting, starting with streamers and YouTube creators, with a longer-term plan extending to music artists, brand communities, and local businesses.

Jake’s read on where the current model breaks comes from nearly two decades in content rights infrastructure. Before Empyre, he co-founded Aegis in 2017 and ran it for nearly nine years as a digital rights platform for YouTube and Facebook creators. Before Aegis, he spent more than six years as a content management specialist at YouTube and founded VULTRA, an early multi-channel network. The consistent observation across all of it, he argues, was that creators build audiences on platforms they do not own, with no mechanism to carry those audiences anywhere else.

Empyre’s first pilot is running with Zavala, a Kick streamer managed by Jake’s business partner Kayn, who previously helped break N3ON into the streaming world. What the pilot is testing is whether licensed, creator-owned clipping functions as a structural product rather than just a compliance argument.

Unregulated Clipping Is Already a Platform Enforcement Risk

Jake notes that unregulated clipping has created a mechanism that lets brands bypass the targeting controls platforms built for paid advertising. A brand restricted from advertising in certain categories, or unwilling to pay platform ad rates, can fund a clipping campaign instead. Clips posted through fan accounts are not subject to the same age-targeting or consent restrictions that govern paid placements. 

“Someone who is a recovering addict, or a person who has a gambling problem, is getting targeted by those videos from clippers,” Jake says. “Because you’re not going through the correct advertising format, you are essentially breaking all of the restrictions in place.”

The risk for creators runs alongside the brand risk. Jake says that creators whose fan bases have been running high-volume unregulated clipping campaigns have seen their own keywords, hashtags, and video rankings stop surfacing. Platforms detect the pattern, he argues, and the algorithmic consequences reach the original creator’s channel, not just the clipping accounts. He points to platform action against gambling and casino content on TikTok as an early example of this enforcement dynamic.

For creators tempted by sponsored clipping deals, Jake frames the calculation plainly. “I can see creators can be tempted to jump in and have a clipping campaign running if someone else is funding it,” he says. “But also worry about your own IP and your protection, because you want to keep your brand safe.”

Platform Compliance Is the Entry Point, Not a Feature

Empyre’s product requires the license before the clip goes anywhere.

When a creator joins the platform, they upload their content to an Asset Manager, which ingests it for Content ID protection and allows them to assign contributor splits across anyone involved in the original production. Fans who want to clip that content apply to the platform, submit their social media channels for verification, and must connect their YouTube account to confirm ownership before any submission is accepted. Clips go through a review and approval process, and the platform flags compliance issues, including existing Content ID claims, before anything is approved.

“The only way for them to get in is to go through the correct process,” Jake says. “Now the content is gate-kept. Fans apply, submissions come in, and it goes straight into the system.”

Revenue flows back to fan clippers based on video performance. Creators see a real-time dashboard showing demographics across fan-generated content: gender breakdown, top countries, and individual clipper performance. For brands evaluating a creator partnership, Jake argues that access to a mapped fan distribution network with verified audience data changes the value of the deal.

The Leaderboard Turns Clipping Into a Verifiable Work History

Alongside the compliance layer, Empyre runs a gamified credentialing system.

Every fan who participates in a clipping program builds a public profile showing clips produced, views generated, and credits earned across creators. A fan who clips for multiple channels develops a verifiable work history, visible to other creators and potential employers. “There’s an opportunity where a creator can give the credit to that editor,” Jake says. “When he goes and pitches for a job, he’s got that credit system on his profile.”

The Oasis example is Jake’s case for why that visibility matters at the creator level. When the band announced its reunion tour, tickets sold out immediately, with tickets quickly appearing on resale platforms. Jake says the band publicly expressed frustration that tickets had not necessarily reached its core fans and wished it had greater visibility into who those fans were. A leaderboard built around clip volume, affiliate activity, and community participation surfaces those people by behavior rather than follower count, according to Jake.

The Zavala case study runs through both layers. One fan who began clipping Zavala’s Kick streams performed well enough on the platform’s leaderboard to be hired as editor for Zavala’s main YouTube channel. He now earns a revenue split from YouTube channel performance alongside earnings from external clips. Jake says Zavala has generated over 150 million views since joining the platform in October, compared to roughly 3,000 views per day before.

Brands Will Need Distribution Before They Negotiate the Deal

For brands, Jake’s argument is that the deal structure has to change before the campaign brief.

He emphasizes that a single brand deal on a single creator channel does not create durable brand awareness. “You’re in a pub, and someone comes up and tells you their name,” Jake says. “And then they walk away. Are you going to remember that person’s name? Not always, unless they made a very deep impression. It’s the same thing with brands in the creator world.”

Brands that will hold negotiating leverage in creator deals, in his view, are those that arrive with existing distribution infrastructure. A brand that has built a clipper network around its current creator partners brings its own distribution to the next deal, rather than depending on a single channel. “The brands that are going to win are going to have thousands of clippers working with them already,” Jake says. “They’re going to come to a creator and say, ‘Let’s do a brand deal,’ and, ‘By the way, we can also blow you up, because we’re going to have this promoted everywhere.'”

Jake identifies fitness, sports, and gaming brands as the categories positioned to build that infrastructure fastest, given their existing community structures. The prerequisite, he says, is that brands stop treating creator marketing as a placement and start building into the ecosystem before the deal is made.

The Infrastructure Bet Is Being Made at Pilot Stage

Empyre’s current footprint is a single streamer pilot and a compliance argument that has not yet been tested at scale.

Jake says agencies have taken calls and attempted to build versions of the model. He argues the compliance knowledge built over nearly two decades inside YouTube’s content management ecosystem cannot be replicated quickly. His longer-term vision is considerably more expansive: Empyre as the infrastructure layer that processes, attributes, and monetizes any recorded content. He cites Disney’s content licensing deal with TikTok as evidence that major IP holders are already looking for systematic distribution frameworks.

Whether that vision is reachable from a single Kick streamer pilot, and whether the licensed clipping model is what creators and brands will choose over the unregulated alternative, is the question the expansion has to answer. “Our moat is compliance,” Jake says. “It’s all about not running before we learn to walk.”

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