Facebook Acquires GIPHY
Facebook is buying GIPHY, the popular GIF-making, and sharing website around $400 million, with plans to integrate the massive GIF library into Instagram and other Facebook apps. News of this deal was first reported by Axios.
What is GIPHY
Giphy is a New York based largest GIF and animated images creating sites on the internet. It offers tools for creating, sharing, and remixing GIFs. It was founded in 2013 and was originally simply a search engine for gifs that contains massive video library, with millions of daily users that share billions of GIFs, that generates revenue via branded content.
The GIPHY’s first major product expansion was an extension that allowed sharing via Facebook, introduced on its founding year, and it quickly added Twitter as a second integration. Various social media platforms rely on Giphy’s API for supplying GIFs, including Twitter, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, and more.
Vishal Shah, Instagram’s VP of product, said in a blog post announcing the news, People will still be able to upload their GIFs, same for developers and API partners. Giphy’s creative community users will still able to create awesome content. Facebook plans to continue to operate Giphy under its own branding and offer integration to outside developers.
Giphy provides built-in search and sticker functions for Facebook’s Instagram, and it will continue to operate in that capacity, becoming a part of the Instagram team. Giphy will also be available to Facebook’s other apps such as the main Facebook app, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp all already work through existing services and additional integrations.
Around 50 percent of all of Giphy’s traffic comes from Facebook apps, with half of that coming from Instagram alone. Facebook says it will not collect any users’ information using Giphy’s API, but it will get valuable data about usage patterns across the web. The tech giant is currently under investigation by federal and state lawmakers for antitrust.
