The Creators Guild of America is making good on its promise to provide support for digital professionals. The seven-month-old service organization has launched Mosaic, a resource that gives creators proper credit for their work.
A banner across the top of the Mosaic website describes it as “the IMDb for everyone.” Like the film and TV credit hub that inspired it, Mosaic offers separate pages for each individual and brand in its database. Users can choose labels — including Creator, Gamer, Brand, Editor, and Founder — to describe their profession. Then they can fill out their profiles by listing sponsorships, collaborations, and other pieces of digital work.
Mosaic is currently available in beta. To bring a measure of organization to the database as it scales, all of its profiles must be peer-reviewed before credits can be listed.
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Daniel Abas, who co-founded the Creators Guild of America, sees Mosaic as one of many steps his organization is taking to accelerate the professionalization of the creator economy. “Historically, [short-form] content was utilized merely for fun or as entertainment or a joke,” Abas told Fast Company. “The accreditation service was born with the intention of recognizing the contributions of digital creators, both in front of the camera and behind it, because this is turning into a serious profession.”
To be eligible for accreditation via Mosaic, creators must meet certain prerequisites. They must have been paid for their work, their content must be distributed on a Guild-recognized platform (i.e. most major social media hubs), and they must have at least 10,000 combined impressions, downloads, or registered users. The Guild will also be on the lookout for copyright infringement as it builds the Mosaic database.
The Creators Guild of America is not the first attempt to build a professional service organization for digital natives. Vlogbrother Hank Green attempted something similar last decade when he spearheaded the short-lived Internet Creators Guild. These days, labor politics are in a completely difference place from where they were in 2016, and the Creators Guild of America is betting that social media professionals are ready for more advocacy on their behalf.
