IMDb has unveiled a feature allowing members of SAG-AFTRA to display their affiliation with the performers’ union on their public and IMDbPro profiles.
The Amazon-owned online film and television database introduced verified badges for union members in September. “As part of our ongoing work to empower entertainment professionals to showcase themselves and their careers on IMDbPro, we’ve launched a new feature for individuals to verify their membership in a professional organization,” a spokesperson for IMDbPro told The Hollywood Reporter. “Professionals who verify their membership have the organization’s logo displayed in the ‘Verified Affiliations’ section on their IMDb and IMDbPro name pages.”
IMDbPro is a professional version of the popular database that offers information on users’ representatives, companies and contact information, among other features.
Members of both IMDbPro’s free subscription service and its paid service can verify their union membership and display the badges. As part of the change, users of IMDbPro Premium can also filter their advanced searches by SAG-AFTRA membership. (Union members with verified badges are also able to receive 30 percent off of subscriptions to IMDb Pro Premium as part of the change.)
The new feature follows the introduction of verified badges for members of the Casting Society of America (CSA), an organization for working casting professionals, in December 2023. IMDb did not respond when asked whether additional labor groups would have their own badges in future, though a verified affiliations page on its website suggests that the database is open to verifications with members of other groups.
“We are pleased to continue collaborating with IMDb to empower SAG-AFTRA members with tools to choose how they want to represent themselves on IMDb and IMDbPro,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a statement. “This new feature makes it easy for performers to highlight their SAG-AFTRA membership to decision-makers who discover talent on IMDbPro and — bonus — gives members access to preferred pricing on IMDbPro Premium.”
In 2022, after a long campaign waged by SAG-AFTRA, IMDb launched a product change that allowed Hollywood workers to manage the name and age information on their public-facing profiles. The union had previously argued for years that publishing actors’ true birth dates could limit their employment prospects, while LGBTQ groups bristled at the database’s practice of publishing birth names of transgender people.
Over a decade after British software engineer Col Needham founded the database, the company launched its professional division in 2002 at the Sundance Film Festival.