About the time that certain companies like Nike and Sony began to come to grip with the incredible potential that online creators held for them, a group of people who were already influential in the area came together and formed a guild whose purpose is to protect the financial and personal interests of creators. According to the reports reaching us from our sources, the group known as the Internet Creators Guild (ICG).
At first, the Internet Creators Guild started out as only a personal project from Hank Green who happens to be one of the most respected and admired creators of YouTube to build a central organization for people who work online. The guild served to educate creators, protect their interests, and equip them enough to succeed on platforms where the monetization methods are subject to constant change. At the time, Hank Green wrote, “There is no system for protecting creators, many of whom have no experience in any industry, let alone the notoriously cut-throat entertainment industry”.
However, the problem the guild had was that the $60-a-year membership and union-friendly language they tried to implement was not well received by the creators themselves, also, the number of people that were already members of the guild were never revealed and they (ICG) had a rough time getting the interest of the actual people it was created to represent.
While the ICG board was announcing the close of the guild, they wrote in a statement saying, “Creators with big audiences often don’t feel the need for support from a collective voice. We believe these attitudes will change as our community encounters new challenges. Antitrust sentiment grows in the US, and Article 13 now threatens the foundation of digital creativity in Europe.”
They (ICG board) further stated that support has “declined to the point where we cannot maintain our work actively,” and that to a great extent brought down the ability to recruit new members.
Even though they have shut down, the guild is worried that networks could exploit creators should they use illegitimate copyright claims to take down, “huge amounts of content”. A case is when record labels allegedly took 70% of every dime spent on YouTube Premium subscriptions and brands mandated that creators shouldn’t reveal how much they are paid for sponsorships and thus making it difficult for people to be paid evenhandedly.
The former executive director of the guild, Anthony D’Angelo however does not seem to be ready to give up as he is working up something else that he believes will protect creators despite the fact that the first attempt was not much of a success.
