Top Creators’ Secret Weapon? Indian Video Editors

Illustrated by Brian Taylor

When 20-somethings open up Instagram, they might see private messages from college classmates, a bawdy brother, or a flirty crush. Mason Amendola, a 22-year-old creator in Athens, Georgia, regularly notices another cohort: Indian video editors.

“There’s a lot of people to choose from,” says Amendola, who also runs a content creation agency. “A lot of these people are reaching out to me. They’re not hard to find.”

As video has exploded on social media, English-speaking editors from India and other countries have become the go-to stop for creators hoping to morph raw video into thumb-stopping content.

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Mega-popular creators like Dude Perfect, former NASA engineer Mark Rober, and chef Nick DiGiovanni have all hired remote editors from across the world, according to Sina Sahami, the CEO of YT Jobs, a LinkedIn, of sorts, for YouTubers. These remote gigs are particularly appealing to international youngsters who wander the world, bopping from country to country.

“That used to be a lifestyle that you could only do if you’re a software engineer,” notes Sahami, who added that earning United States currency is also attractive to these workers.

Sahami says his Canada-based company now has over 250,000 editors on the platform — around a 50 percent jump from last year — and almost 80 percent of them are based outside of the U.S. Many of these editors join Telegram groups and Discord servers, in which they trade advice about software such as Adobe After Effects and DaVinci Resolve. These tools help transform boring podcasts or talking-head videos into animated, engaging posts.

While basic clipping remains a popular marketing method, creators often hire these editors to make meatier videos — whether short-form or hour-long podcasts. On longer videos, some creators hire an editor to solely focus on the first ten seconds, when audiences can drop-off in significant numbers. “They have to be very creative,” says Sahami about these editors. “Those guys are kind of acting like a creative partner, and they usually are a lot more expensive and very, very hard to retain.”

For regular editors, creators can spend anywhere from $30 per hour of work to over one thousand dollars per project. Some bring remote editors on board full-time, easily spending over one hundred thousand dollars on their salaries.

However, it doesn’t always mean outsourcing editing to India or the Philippines is cheaper than made-in-America videos. But since editing talent is now globally distributed, creators are becoming more agnostic about their collaborators’ home base.

“We have not seen it be significantly cheaper, to be honest,” says Amendola, who has employed in-house editors, referring to global talent. “There’s some cases where I pay them more than I pay some of our own editors on certain projects, just because they’re really talented.”

Besides Instagram hustling and scouring job boards, entrepreneurial editors find gigs when creators call out for help. Vi Lanot, a 24-year-old editor based in the Philippines, found regular work with vlogger Nas Daily after he posted about hiring editors. Lanot says she believes tens of thousands of editors applied.

Lanot, who has edited for over a decade, initially became interested in editing professionally so that she could support her family. “It’s mostly for them for a better life,” she says.

Lanot and other editors see themselves as tag-teaming with the stars of their videos. While television editors might not watch the shows they splice and dice, many of these newer workers regularly watch vertical videos with quick cuts — the very type of content they’re being asked to make. “They grew up on the internet. This was their classroom,” says Josh Kaplan, the CEO of Smooth Media, which manages creators. “They understand the edit style.”

During the initial social media boom, some industry experts believed creators had to be Swiss Army knives — an all-in-one package of charisma, cinematography skills, and editing expertise. These days, more creators are zeroing in on being pure talent, which has expanded the market for editors. “You might be really great at understanding your topic, but you might not be the fastest, best editor in After Effects,” says Kaplan. “So the ecosystem is filling out with this next generation and being like, ‘Maybe I want to edit.’”

Sahami says many popular YouTubers realize editing their own videos is no longer a smart time investment. It sounds like a perfect recipe for AI to emerge. So what will happen to the growing creator services class?

“If you’re looking at the lower end of the editing, AI can do a lot of that,” admits Sahami.

But to stand out on social media, Sahami and others agree that success still requires taste and creativity, which can stem from these editors. “If you watch a Steven Bartlett interview, you’re hooked because of the way they cut that trailer,” says Kaplan, referring to the Diary of a CEO host. “That trailer has so much human creativity in it still that I don’t really see that getting automated away yet.”