🔴 Inside one of X's most viral entertainment accounts

Do you still call it Twitter? Or are you more of an X person? Either way, if you’ve used the platform at all in the last few years, you’ve seen Culture Crave. The 1-million-follower account is an ever-present purveyor of movie and television updates.

For this edition, I spoke to Zach Williamson, the man behind Culture Crave and a raft of other X accounts.

In this episode:

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— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor

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“I could do that,” Zach Williamson remembers thinking the first time he noticed, in the early 2010s, that some social accounts were sharing content they’d clearly been paid to post. And he could; he does, as the man behind Culture Crave, a 1-million-follower X account that anchors a 4.3-million-plus-follower network and drove between four and five million clicks to other people’s websites last year.

Though Zach did not provide us an up-to-date revenue number, in a 2023 interview, he said that across all his businesses, including social accounts and consulting, he was generating between $20k and $40k in monthly revenue, with expenses around $5k. Expenses remain roughly the same.

Nowadays, Zach’s revenue is primarily generated through partnerships with movie studios or agencies representing those studios.

He’s developed two things of value to these businesses:

The bulk of deals Zach accepts nowadays are CPM-based; for example, when we spoke in late June, he’d just done a deal for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The film’s marketing team had produced an easter egg-tracking site; Zach promoted that site.

Other clients in the last year include Lionsgate for their Stephen King movie, The Long Walk, Sony for Chainsaw Man, and Jackass: Best and Last.

Zach originally started Culture Crave in 2017, before selling the account during the pandemic, with around 800k followers.

However, the deal fell through, and while he lost the account, he retained the name and brand. The account we see today dates to 2019, with X records indicating four username changes since, the most recent being a repurposing to Culture Crave in June 2023, when he re-secured the brand.

How was Zach able to rebuild his following with relative speed? It’s the center of a network of accounts with more narrow focuses that lend themselves to cross-promotion.

Back in the early 2010s, Zach started his career as a social media expert by building theme pages — some on sports topics, one called “Stuff Drake Does,” which he says did particularly well. He built an account called Thrones Facts during the Game of Thrones years, then replicated his success with Marvel Facts and Star Wars Facts.

Eventually, Zach wanted an account that could cover everything — movies, TV, video games — so he built Culture Crave and seeded it with the audiences he already had, cross-posting stories from the niche accounts until the broader one could stand on its own."

His social portfolio includes at least the below accounts, with a combined following of at least 4.298 million:

(Actual total following may be higher, especially when including multiple newsletters without public subscriber counts, as well as other less-used social accounts.)

The Facts pages now run mostly on algorithmic distribution rather than notifications.

He may add accounts to the portfolio yet, though he’s now more interested in acquisitions than in starting from scratch. Latest in Space was such an acquisition; the account had around 10,000 followers when Zach bought it, and the original owner still helps run it on the side — he’d actually approached Zach, no longer wanting to run it himself.

He does plan to build out accounts from scratch on platforms other than X, with a desire to build up Culture Crave on TikTok and Instagram if he can find the right video talent, which he says would increase monthly expenses from the $5k to $7k range up past $10k.

Aside from social, Culture Crave has a website. Many of the links in Culture Crave tweets point to sites like Variety or Deadline, but Zach says they will also increasingly go to Pop Culture News and Culture Crave’s newsletter, where he and his team will stand up more original content.

Though his work involves news, I would not describe Zach as a journalist, nor would he; his expertise is in mass distribution to social media users.

The X accounts run by the trade publications he often gets his news from — Variety, The Hollywood Reporter — might have a couple million more followers than Culture Crave, but their engagement rates pale in comparison to Zach’s.

Culture Crave’s business model is to attract and sell attention on X; Variety, by contrast, monetizes through ads on its website and in its print editions, paid subscriptions, and events, among other revenue streams. This business model can support Zach and his small team, and he would not make as much money were he employed solely by one of the trade publications he often sources from.

That said, Zach previously did this kind of work for Rolling Stone Australia from 2022 to 2023; he co-led editorial strategy there, averaging over 600k unique monthly visitors over the course of his contract.

And when we spoke, Zach said his social accounts drove in the range of “four or five million clicks” last year to websites besides his own, including both advertisers and publishers. Though he rarely includes a source link in the initial post, Zach will add a reply with the link where relevant.

This spring, Nieman Lab published a story, in collaboration with Chartbeat, the media analytics company, analyzing publisher traffic (from 1,026 of Chartbeat’s publisher-clients) since the start of 2019.

During that period, publishers’ traffic from then-Twitter peaked in 2020 (during the height of the pandemic) at 660 million pageviews. By the end of Q1 2026, it had fallen to 110 million pageviews.

The total from-Twitter pageview count for 2025, in Laura Hazard Owen’s piece for Nieman Lab, was 525 million. Now, this does not represent all publisher traffic from Twitter (only 1,026 of Chartbeat’s clients), and Zach’s 4–5 million clicks driven in 2025 do not exclusively include advertisers, but still: that this one-creator network of accounts drove the equivalent of between 0.76% and 0.95% of that traffic is a statement of his influence.

But Zach is aware that his ability to play the algorithm is ever at risk to the whims of X’s ownership.

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Zach is an expert at packaging for virality on X. He is not a short-form video expert — and he does not run a clipping network, but he does have a better-than-average (and up-close) understanding of the clipping business. So I asked him to explain the basics.

Clipping is an evolution of that pay-to-post arrangement Zach noticed in the early 2010s. A brand, studio, or label posts a bounty for the promotion of a cultural product; networks of social media accounts create and post clips, competing for a limited pool of funds; they are paid per view.

A million views through clipping can cost as little as $100 and as much as $1,000. The industry includes solo operators and scaled businesses alike — last year, Anthony Fujiwara, who edits for iShowSpeed and PlaqueBoyMax, launched a clipping company (called Clipping) to edit content for creators across platforms like YouTube and Twitch, and earned ~$7.7 million in sales with over 20,000 contracted clippers in just 10 months.

Where does clipping happen? In Discord channels, Telegram chats, and through dedicated websites. Vyro is one such site, a clipping service used by MrBeast, Mark Rober, and Unwell, as advertised at the top of the site.

Many of these Discord servers will have around 10,000 members.

How are clippers paid? Typically on a CPM basis. Most campaigns, Zach says, are priced at $1.50 per 1,000 views (or less). Music campaigns tend to pay the least, because all the creator has to do is attach a song to a video. When these Discord servers have a $2-CPM campaign, they’ll even send out a push notification to drive engagement.

And if they’re having trouble completing a campaign (clients typically pay for a specific view count in a given time period), they’ll increase the bounty — which may eat into their profits, but is necessary to close out the campaign.

The content is produced on a speculative basis, with no contracted guarantee of payment.

Clippers rarely disclose that they were paid for their work. Zach stresses that he does not publish undisclosed clips, but that lack of disclosure is rampant in the clipping world. He’s often seen a need for clips to appear organic written into the clipping server campaign briefs.

Clipping services could feasibly move in-house — on both the brand and platform sides. Zach mentioned music companies — that he does not work with many, but “they all do clipping.” He recently spoke to one of their executives, who said the company was considering setting up its own clipping program to gain more control. Ultimately, he could see them removing the middleman here.

And he says there’s a possibility that platforms try to eliminate clipping, but why would they? It captures attention, keeps people on-platform, and generates advertising revenue. Another possibility is that they set up platform-native bounty portals.

Zach is ultimately bearish on clipping as it exists today. He believes clipping won’t disappear, but will become a smaller part of more focused and segmented marketing strategies: