The Viral Niche of TikTok's Copper-Stripping Side Hustle Community

A woman in blue overalls layered over a pink tank top sits on a workbench in a tool-lined workshop, holding a frayed scrap of copper wire in one hand and a compact precision mechanical tool in the other, grinning directly at the camera. “Let’s make money stripping…” she pauses for playful dramatic effect, before finishing the pun: “Wire!”

This silly wordplay is a staple in a little-documented tight corner of TikTok, where creators film their full process of stripping insulation off scrap copper wire to resell the raw metal for extra side cash. Most of these creators do not collaborate with one another, use a unified shared hashtag, or coin any of the viral "-maxxing" neologisms popular across other TikTok subcultures. But their videos share a distinct, instantly recognizable visual signature: a clunky broken old appliance gets pried apart piece by piece, thick industrial electrical wire gets pulled apart like chewy licorice ropes, and at the end of the process, viewers are left with a neat stack of shiny, warm amber raw copper.

The participants in this micro-community span every demographic: some are casual hobbyists or working electricians chasing extra income, others are people saving up for a specific big-ticket purchase, and a subset appears to be cash-strapped teen side hustlers. They post content in a wide range of languages including English, French, Spanish, German, and Romanian. At least one creator in the space even runs a separate Etsy shop selling hand-poured copper bricks (called ingots), made by melting down their scrap copper and pouring molten metal into custom molds.

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Scrap copper resale is far from a new phenomenon. The metal is relatively rare in natural deposits, one of the world’s most efficient electrical conductors, and 100% infinitely recyclable — properties that have made it one of the most valuable high-demand scrap metals for hundreds of years. But copper prices hit an all-time historical peak in 2024, turning the hobby into a far more lucrative opportunity for scrappers than it has been in decades. Per International Monetary Fund data, copper was worth roughly $14,473 per metric ton in September, or ~$7.23 per pound — more than double the market value copper held back in September 2020.

There is no centralized reliable data tracking exactly how many people are reselling scrap copper these days, but surging rates of copper theft (which usually involves stripping metal from abandoned vehicles, home plumbing systems, and unused building roofing) offer a useful proxy for that trend. Craig Depken II, economics department chair and professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte who has spent years researching copper theft patterns, explains that theft rates almost always spike under two specific conditions: first, when copper prices are climbing rapidly, exactly the market dynamic playing out right now, and second, when widespread economic distress pushes large numbers of people to decide that the potential payout from copper outweighs the legal risks of getting caught. For context, selling lawfully sourced scrap copper is legal across every U.S. state except Minnesota, which requires sellers to hold a state-issued scrap dealer license.

On TikTok, accounts focused on the copper-stripping niche can easily rack up hundreds of thousands of followers. Even total beginners to the hobby can pick up their own wire stripper — the small, specialized tool that slices through wire insulation and separates the raw copper core from its plastic or rubber outer sheath — directly on TikTok Shop. As of this writing, the top-selling consumer wire stripper on the platform has sold more than 20,000 units across the globe.

The Economics of Stripped Copper

The final resale price for recycled scrap copper varies based on a handful of key factors, including the metal’s purity, its industry grading, and whether it is still encased in its original plastic or rubber insulation. Insulated copper only sells for a tiny fraction of the price of fully stripped, bare copper, so almost all resellers take the time to remove all the outer coating themselves to maximize their profit margins. But even with a specialized wire stripper, the process can be slow, repetitive, and deeply tedious. For many creators in this space, posting their stripping sessions online turns the monotonous chore into a far more enjoyable, social activity. Users have filmed everything from wire-stripping girls’ nights, movie nights, and even casual date nights centered around sorting and stripping wire. In a viral August clip, creator @Payciencu.u films herself stripping wire on her bed next to a man wearing a red sweatshirt. The on-screen text overlay reads, “How down bad are you? Well I’m stripping wire just to hang out with him sooo.”

Other creators treat copper scrapping as a full-time side hustle or serious hobby, posting time-lapse compilations, step-by-step tutorials, and curated lists of the “worst, most frustrating cables to strip for copper.” Benjamin Stickle, a criminal justice professor at Middle Tennessee State University and author of the 2017 book Metal Scrappers and Thieves, categorizes legal, legitimate scrappers into three core groups: people scraping just to make ends meet and cover basic bills, tradespeople reselling scrap metal they collect as a byproduct of their job sites, and small groups raising money for charity. Electricians, who make up a huge share of the TikTok copper-stripping creator base, fall cleanly into the tradesperson category. But many other creators are far harder to categorize, especially when a large share of their income comes directly from TikTok creator payouts rather than scrap copper sales.

Creator @Courtney2291, who did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment, started posting earlier this year documenting her goal to strip enough copper to save $20,000 for a down payment on a three-bedroom house. She sourced old wire and discarded machinery from family contacts, her local scrap yard, and Facebook Marketplace, stripping wire nearly every single day. On October 10, just over six months after she started her project, she shared that she had hit her $20,000 savings goal — but almost none of that money came from selling copper. Per a scrap yard receipt Courtney shared publicly, she only made $99 total selling the 30 pounds of stripped copper she processed over those six months. One of her TikTok videos, by contrast, earned her $1,446 alone after racking up 6.8 million views, per a creator payout screenshot she shared in a separate upload. Unsurprisingly, Courtney says she has no plans to stop posting content. “Once the house is mine, fully renovated and ready to move into, I’ll keep posting pretty much the same kind of content,” she told viewers. Her next big goal? Paying off the remaining loan for the two acres of land her new home sits on.

Scale, Spectacle, and Affiliate Income

Other top copper-focused creators, including the popular accounts King of Copper and Queen of Copper, take a very different content approach, leaning into massive scale and high-production spectacle instead of personal, intimate storytelling. Their videos show them unloading pallets of old wire crates weighing hundreds of pounds, then methodically stripping every single piece of copper in those massive hauls. The two creators say they are not affiliated with one another despite their matching brand names and similar video formats, but they do occasionally repost each other’s content to their audiences. Both have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across TikTok and YouTube, though their total earnings from creator payouts are not publicly known. King of Copper is currently more than 70 days into a self-declared challenge to source, strip, and resell a full 1 ton of pure copper. In early September, 44 days into his challenge, he shared he had already collected 271 pounds of stripped copper. In one recent clip, he spent five full hours stripping wire, melting the copper down in a small black furnace, and pouring the molten metal into six ingot molds, producing a finished batch of copper he valued at roughly $90. In another video, he spent two hours meticulously taking apart a 110-pound discarded air conditioning unit, and pulled out roughly 7 pounds of raw copper worth around $47. His oddly satisfying videos are wildly popular, but his total earnings from content creation are unconfirmed, and King of Copper did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.

A major underdiscussed revenue stream for these copper niche accounts is selling wire strippers and other related tools via TikTok Shop affiliate programs. Every time a viewer buys a product through the affiliate link pinned to their video, the creator earns a percentage commission of the sale. Courtney, for example, has posted multiple sponsored clips advertising her own preferred model of wire stripper. But many of these affiliate sellers, like creator @Dragonslayer_Industries, barely even talk about copper stripping as a side activity outside of their ads. “If you’ve got any scrap wire laying around, you need this exact wire stripper right here,” Dragonslayer Industries says in a January promotional clip, as he feeds a bright green insulated wire through the tool he has linked for sale. “This thing is basically going to print money for you. It will probably pay for itself in the first hour you use it.” In a June comment on one of his older videos, he added: “It’s crazy, I only got this because my neighbor was stripping wire by hand. I got sent a free sample, and I thought I’d make 2 videos and give the tool to him. I thought this was such a tiny niche that no one would buy it. It’s been my top-selling product ever since I started making affiliate videos. I reliably sell 5 to 10 of these a day.” By May, he claimed he had helped sell thousands of wire strippers total. His total earnings from the affiliate program are unconfirmed, as TikTok Shop merchants set their own custom commission rates. Dragonslayer Industries did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment, but in a recent video he noted that it was not in his financial interest to spend much time actually stripping wire himself, since he makes far more money via affiliate sales and other business ventures.

Even human affiliate sellers like him face stiff competition from a flood of AI-generated promotional ads on TikTok Shop. Even in this hyper-specialized wire stripper niche, there are thousands of promotional videos on the platform with AI-generated visuals and robotic voiceovers, many using near-identical scripts promising viewers they can make “eight grand a week” selling scrap copper.

Offline Community

While scrap copper stripping can look like a totally solo, isolated hobby from the content posted on TikTok, the offline scrapping world has tight-knit communities that rarely show up in viral clips. Stickle tells WIRED that almost all the scrappers he interviewed for his research worked in small, informal teams, split their profits fairly, and looked out for each other. People who were struggling to make ends meet, especially unhoused scrappers, often got donated free scrap metal from more established members of the community to help them get started. Scrappers also coordinated with friends who owned pickup trucks to help haul extra-large loads of scrap that they couldn’t move on their own. “If they stumbled on a huge pile of scrap metal that was way too big to move with just a dolly, they always had a contact they could call to come help,” Stickle explained.