GIPHY Collaborates With (And Pays) Creators As Part Of Its New ‘Creators Club’

Facebook-owned GIPHY has launched Creators Club, a collaborative program where it will work with creators to make original GIFs and short videos.

Each Creators Club member will work with a “dedicated team” at GIPHY’s Los Angeles creative studio that will provide them with guidance, professional opportunities, custom learning sessions with industry experts, and an undisclosed amount of funding “to help elevate Creators’ endeavors to the next level,” GIPHY says.

The first twelve creators selected to participate are Andrés Acosta, Kel Cripe, Clayton Farris, James Koroni, Dylan McKeever, Jasmine Moore, Fia Oruene, Sarah Squirm, TIMA, Thu Tran, Tien Tran, and Christina Xing.

Three of them–Moore, Squirm, and Cripe–have already dropped content. A glance at their GIPHY profiles shows that all three have two things in common: they’re new to GIPHY, and they’ve already got followings on Instagram–which, of course, is also owned by GIPHY’s parent Facebook.

(An original GIF from Moore’s summer rollerskating-themed collection.)

All twelve creators will release original content throughout the rest of 2021. New content will drop on a regular basis, GIPHY says, with some releases “thoughtfully timed as Creators chose to make content that is timely and relevant to certain parts of the year as well as to cultural moments.”

GIPHY says the goal of Creators Club is to “provide a launchpad for Creators to manifest entertaining and conversational content in new ways while also providing them with mentorship and hands on support from GIPHY Studios.”

Content creators produce through the club will be added to GIPHY’s enormous digital database, which is free for internet denizens to share across social media and the world wide web at large.

GIPHY referred to the above twelve creators as its “2021 participants,” so it appears Creators Club will be an ongoing program, with new creators brought on board each year.

This is GIPHY’s first original program for creators. The platform launched in 2013 and was acquired by Facebook last year for a reported $400 million.