In one recent video, King of Copper spent five hours stripping wire, melting the copper in a black furnace, and then pouring it into six-ingot molds, producing what he claimed was about $90 worth of metal. In another clip, he spent two hours meticulously dismantling a 110-pound air conditioner and extracted roughly 7 pounds of copper, which he valued at $47.
His videos are mesmerizing to watch, but it’s unknown how much he might earn from them, and King of Copper did not respond to inquiries from WIRED.
Strip Mall
Another way copper accounts can earn revenue is by marketing wire strippers and other goods for sale on TikTok Shop. When viewers purchase products through links in their videos, creators can earn a commission on each sale. Courtney, for instance, has advertised her own wire stripper. But many of these salespeople, like the creator @Dragonslayer_Industries, don’t speak much about copper outside of their ads.
“If you’ve got any scrap wire laying around, you need this wire stripper right here,” Dragonslayer Industries says in a January video before feeding a bright green wire through a machine linked for purchase. “This thing is basically just gonna print money for you. Probably pay for itself in the first hour you use it.”
“It’s crazy, I only got this because my neighbor was stripping wire by hand,” he said in a June comment on one of his videos. “I got the free sample and thought l’d do 2 videos and give it to him. I thought it was such a niche thing that they probably wouldn’t sell. It’s been my biggest seller since l started doing affiliate videos. I can count on 5-10 of these a day selling.”
In May, he claimed to have helped sell thousands of wire strippers. It’s unclear how much he’s earned, since TikTok Shop merchants set their own affiliate commission rates. Dragonslayer Industries did not respond to WIRED’s inquiries, but in a recent video he noted that it’s not in his “best interest” to devote much time to wire stripping since he makes “more money” from doing other things.
But human salespeople like him face plenty of competition from AI-generated ads on TikTok Shop. Even in the specialized market for wire strippers, there’s a huge number of videos featuring AI-generated imagery and voice-overs, some using remarkably similar scripts about making “eight grand a week” from selling scrap copper.
Online, copper scrapping can seem like a solitary pursuit. Offline, however, scrappers sometimes form the kinds of communities that are less apparent on TikTok. Stickle tells WIRED that scrappers he spoke to often worked in small teams, split their profits, and looked out for one another. People struggling to get by, especially those who were experiencing homelessness, sometimes received donated metal from their fellow scrappers.
Stickle adds that they also would lean on friends who had trucks for help transporting large hauls. “If they came across a large amount [of metal] that they couldn’t just dolly back to a place,” Stickle says, “they had somebody they’d call.”